Lucid Hydra Performance Review on the AMD Platform

Asus ENGTX460 DirectCU/2DI/1GD5

I’m not sure who names these things, but at least the model numbers make sense.  It is certainly hard to write out, and even worse to try to say out loud.  This particular model is Asus’ stock clocked DirectCU version of the GTX 460.  It is not overclocked, but it does feature a heftier cooler than the previous GTX 460 768.


Instead of two 8 mm copper heat pipes, this cooler has three of them in direct contact with the GPU.  It shares the same single, large fan that keeps the air flowing briskly, but is not very noisy at all.  The core is clocked at 675 MHz, with the shaders running at 1350 MHz.  The memory features the full 256 bit bus, all of which is clocked at 900 MHz (3600 effective) giving a sum total of 115.2 GB/sec of bandwidth.  The chip is “fully” functional, in that it is the highest spec for a GTX 460.  It has 32 ROPs and 336 shaders.  If memory serves me correctly, the GTX 460 only utilizes 7 of the 8 included stream processing units.  If all 8 were utilized, then the chip would have 384 total Cuda Cores.  The GTX 560 Ti on the other hand is a fully functional part which does in fact utilize all 384 cores.


The full 1GB of memory and wider memory bus give this card better overall (and smoother) performance than its 768 MB sibling.  I discovered during gameplay with titles such as Metro 2033 that the extra frame buffer size does in fact help to limit stuttering and other drops in gameplay.  This particular board was my favorite to work with (other than the often surprising GTS 450), as it was smooth in nearly every gameplay situation that I threw at it.  It also stayed very cool even under load, and I never heard the fan spin up or even become audible over the other fans in the test rig.

The board also features dual DVI outputs, as well as the mini-HDMI port.  While the fan on the card is not a directional blower, the backplate does feature slots to allow some airflow from the GPU to escape out the back of the case.  The Asus GTX 460s require the use of 2 x 6 pin PCI-Express power cables to run, which means that we are seeing potential power usage above 150 watts.  I believe the official line is that the card is under 150 watts at normal speeds, but once overclocking begins it can go well over that 150 watt mark.


Speaking of overclocking, due to the more aggressive cooling of this card, it was very happy hitting 900 MHz core with very little effort.  Above that required some voltage tweaking.  At 900 MHz, the card starts to perform a lot like the higher end GTX 470.  There is just a lot of potential leg room with these cards in terms of clock speed.  Heat and power does go up with MHz, but the cooler again kept pace and I rarely (if ever) heard the fan.


The card comes in around $169 after rebate at most retailers, which is a very good deal considering what this card can do.  It really is amazing to think that this product is actually faster than the previous high end GTX 285 in most instances.  Plus users get the added benefit of being DX11 compliant.  If I were on any kind of budget, this would be the lowest performance video card I would even look at.  I would find extra yard work to go do to get the extra $20 to $30 over less expensive cards (or maybe even shovel some snow).  This card just takes everything that is thrown its way.  The GTX 460 really was the redemption product for NVIDIA in many ways.  It simply delivered, and Asus has built a very nice card around that particular GPU.