Final thoughts and rating
NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 460 graphics card hits many of the right notes for a £150-£200 GPU. One of its most desirous features is the accomplished overclocking it provides for those who take but a minute to tinker with the frequencies.Heavily exploited by add-in board partners with a plethora of factory-overclocked cards, we've seen frequencies raised from the default 675MHz core and 3,600MHz memory to 800MHz/4,000MHz, and beyond.
POV TGT's Ultra Charged 768MB, our review card for today, represents second-rung performance in the TGT stable yet still clocks in at an impressive 824MHz/4,020MHz, all with the default cooling design first put forward from NVIDIA. This means whisper-quiet idling and unobtrusive under-load noise.
Our benchmarks show that, across five games, it gets very close to the performance of the Radeon HD 5850. But POV's card ships at £191, attracting a £40 premium over bone-stock models, and such is the focus on frequencies, the sparse bundle exposes that it's designed for speed above all else.
Super-highly-clocked GeForce GTX 460s put considerable pressure on the older high-end guard, and we can see obvious and compelling reasons for purchasing the POV TGT Ultra Charged 768MB. However, an all-out reservation is mitigated by the fact that most, if not all, GTX 460s will manage these frequencies with a minute spent with an overclocking utility, and POV TGT's very own 850MHz/4,020MHz-rated Beast and Colorful's recently announced iGame GTX 460 1GB, clocking in at a stupendous 900MHz/4,200MHz, render the Ultra Charged somewhat impotent in comparison.
The Good
Reference design means it's
very quiet
Decent overclocking headroom
The Bad
Lacklustre bundle; GTX 460s
miss out on free Mafia II
Most will get better value by opting for a stock-clocked 1GB card and
overclocking it
No control over the GPU's voltage
HEXUS Rating
HEXUS Where2Buy
The POV TGT GeForce GTX 460 768MB Ultra Charged graphics card can be purchased from Scan.co.uk at a cost of £190.89.
HEXUS Right2Reply
At HEXUS, we invite the companies whose products we test to comment on our articles. If any company representatives for the products reviewed choose to respond, we'll publish their commentary here verbatim.
