Specifications and Testing Configuration

The clock speeds and feeds on the EVGA GTX 460 2WIN are going to be pretty much what you would expect; there isn’t any out-of-the-box overclocking or anything going on here:

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EVGA GeForce GTX 460 2WIN 2GB Specifications

Each of the GTX 460 GPUs is running at 700 MHz core clock and 1400 MHz shader clock with a GDDR5 memory speed of 900 MHz.  Each GPU sports a total of 336 shader processors and a 256-bit memory bus to a 1GB frame buffer.  That brings the total to 672 shaders, 512-bit memory bus, and 2GB for the whole card with an effective memory bandwidth of 230.4 GB/s and a texture fill rate of 78.4 GT/s.  These are obviously theoretical numbers and we will have to see how the card performs in our real-world tests.

The good news is that we have seen GTX 460 1GB SLI configurations countless times before so we have a good idea of what to expect.  What we haven’t looked at before is how a pair of GTX 460 1GB GPUs stands up against the best single card solutions on the market as of April 2011.  Here is the route we are taking:

The GTX 460 2WIN will be going against the best single-GPU graphics cards on the market including even the GeForce GTX 580.  We left the Radeon HD 6990 and GeForce GTX 590 out of the equation simply because the prices were SO MUCH higher than the others listed here; try $700+.  

Also, keep in mind that you can buy a pair of GTX 460 1GB graphics cards and get the same performance and features (though in a larger space) for less money.  A quick check at Newegg indicated that GTX 460 1GB cards are going for as little as $150 with a pair in SLI running only $300.  In fact you can even go the route of a pair of GTX 560 Ti cards which should offer slightly more performance than this EVGA GTX 460 2WIN card for about $50 more: $230 each.

Our benchmarking and testing setup remains pretty much unchanged:

  • Testing Configuration
  • ASUS P6X58D Premium Motherboard
  • Intel Core i7-965 @ 3.33 GHz Processor
  • 3 x 2GB Corsair DDR3-1333 MHz Memory
  • Western Digital VelociRaptor 600GB HDD
  • Corsair Professional Series 1200w PSU
  • Benchmarks used: 3DMark Vantage, 3DMark11, Metro 2033, Lost Planet 2, Civilization V, F1 2010, Left 4 Dead 2, 3DMark11
  • NVIDIA Driver: 270.61
  • AMD Driver: 11.3

I did run into one hiccup with this card that I thought I should point out: SLI wasn’t enabled initially after installing the driver and rebooting:

driver1.png

This is likely a driver bug of some kind (or maybe it is by design) but be sure you change this to the maximum performance mode to get the multi-GPU scaling you’d expect.

Let’s dive into our performance testing and see how the EVGA GTX 460 2WIN stands up to this kind of competition!

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