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The Asus TOP edition of the GTX 460 adds its now-familiar DirectCU cooling engine and pushes the clock speed a full 100MHz higher than the stock GTX 460’s 675MHz. That’s a 15 percent overclock. That, plus the 11 percent memory overclock, says as much about the cooler design as the GPU. However, that also raises the price. You can find this card for less than $210 at a few retailers, but it’s more likely to be around $220.
Pushing the GTX 460 this hard pays off dividends. Asus’s TOP card delivers impressive performance, but even that 100MHz overclock can’t quite keep up with the HD 6870.
In other respects, the card’s design is pretty standard: two dual-link DVI connectors plus a Mini-HDMI port handle output chores (only two can be active at once). The card supports SLI (two cards maximum) for additional performance. Note that the maximum power draw approached 300W in our test system, which is pretty high for a sub-$300 card.
Overall, the Asus GTX 460 1GB TOP is an impressive engineering feat that offers good gaming performance without hammering your wallet.
Great gaming performance for the price.
Gets a little loud.
| Asus ENGTX460 TOP 1GB | |
|---|---|
| Shader Units* | 336 |
| Texture Units | 56 |
| ROPs | 32 |
| Power Connectors | 2 x 6-pin |
| Core Clock | 775MHz |
| Shader Clock | 1,550MHz |
| GDDR5 Memory Clock | 1,000MHz |
| GDDR5 Frame Buffer | 1GB |
| Memory Interface | 256-bit |
| Asus ENGTX460 TOP 1GB | |
|---|---|
| 3DMark 2011 | 3,963 |
| 3DMark Vantage | 16,226 |
| Unigine Heaven 2.1 (fps) | 18 |
| Crysis (fps) | 23 |
| Battle Forge (fps) | 40 |
| Far Cry 2 (fps) | 83 |
| F1 2010 (fps) | 43 |
| HAWX 2 (fps) | 101 |
| Metro 2033 (fps) | 15 |
| STALKER: CoP (fps) | 35 |
| Just Cause 2 Concrete Jungle (fps) | 35 |
| Aliens vs. Predator (fps) | 21 |
| Power @ idle (W) | 133 |
| Power @ full throttle (W) | 298 |
Our test bed is a 3.33GHz Core i7-975 Extreme Edition in an Asus P6X58D Premium motherboard with 6GB of DDR3/1333 and an 850TX Corsair PSU. The OS is 64-bit Windows Ultimate. All games are run at 1920x1200 with 4x AA.
