MSI N460GTX Cyclone 1GD5 Pro Reviews

Compared to the 768MB version which offers similar performance, the value of not just this model but all the other 1GB ones isn’t quite as strong. The slightly wider bus and extra ROPs do very little for extra performance on a whole. The good news is that the 1GB version isn't all that much more expensive than the 768MB one. Also, compared to other models like the GTX 465 and HD 5830 to name just a few, the overall value is still better which is fantastic news for the consumer.

From a performance standpoint, it's impossible to argue with the numbers this card puts up, at its price point. As I hypothesized in my Final Thoughts, this is really a 5850-class card from a technology standpoint, and it performed like one. Overclocked up to what seems like its natural operating point, at 850 MHz on the core, it swept the field in its market segment. The cooling performance was first rate, including the noise required to achieve it, which was quite low. This is also one of the few cards where I would leave the fan settings on factory automatic; the default curve is aimed at performance users. The combination of a new low-power Fermi GPU, a well designed, oversized cooler, and a performance oriented fan profile kept operating temperatures quite low during both intensive gaming and brutal stress testing.

The MSI N4600GTX Cyclone 1GD5 video card was found to be about 6% faster than the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 460 1GB reference card. The MSI N4600GTX Cyclone 1GD5 features a 50MHz boost on the GPU core clock and that was enough to give it the performance boost needed to beat out the reference card in the performance tests that we ran. It was interesting that MSI didn't overclock the 1GB GDDR5 memory chips at all, as other companies are putting slight overclocks on the memory.