2GB model compared with 1GB and 768MB Page 1 / 18 08/19/10
Introduction and Test Setup
Nvidia's GTX 460 is a very interesting graphics card. It is sold at a reasonable price point, and offers more than decent gaming performance up to 1920 X 1200 resolution in most modern gaming titles. A google search will return tens of reviews where the GTX 460 can be seen performing against the GTX 470 and GTX 480 and pulling off some very respectable numbers. The card's performance, low heat and noise and great overclockability are certainly attractive features, but what makes it especially intriguing to me is the fact that it comes in three distinct flavors. Nvidia offers two versions; one with 768 MB of GDDR5 RAM and another with 1 GB. Some GPU manufacturers have released GTX 460 versions with 2 GB of RAM instead of the standard configurations offered by nvidia. One such manufacturer is Palit, and today's article will look into how the amount of GPU RAM affects gaming performance. This sort of analysis had always been on my plate and I got quite close to testing GTX 285 TRI SLI with 1 GB and 2 GB versions, however that never materialized. Fortunately I have been able to acquire 6 Palit GTX 460s, and this article will analyze their performance in both single card and Dual GPU SLI modes.
Here are some specifications on these cards:
Note that GTX 460 is not exactly a high end card and we should not expect any earth shattering performance improvements with higher frame buffer. This should be especially true between the 1 GB and 2 GB versions, since both have the same memory bus (256-bit) width resulting in the same memory bandwidth at a given memory clock speed.
The following setup was utilized for this article:
I7 920 @ 2.67 - 4.3 GHZ
3 X 2 GB Patriot Viper 1620 MHZ 7-8-8-20
EVGA X58 Motherboard
2 X Palit GTX 460 768 MB (Forceware 258.96)
2 X Palit Sonic GTX 460 1 GB (Forceware 258.96)
2 X Palit Sonic GTX 460 2 GB (Forceware 258.96)
150 GB 10,000 RPM Velociraptor
Dell 3008 wfp 30" LCD
Antec 1200 Watt PSU
Windows 7 64 bit
The sonic versions of these cards come with a slight overclock out of the box. For this review, however, I tested everything at stock settings.
Related reading: Radeon 5870 2GB vs 1GB in Single card, CrossfireX and Trifire modes
| NEXT |
|---|