ASUS ENGTX460 DirectCU/2DI/1GD5 Pro Reviews

The ASUS ENGTX460 retails online for $240, making it a worthy purchase for those wanting a video card in that price range. The card is overclocked, meaning that you get more performance out of the card out of the box without tweaking it. Two of these cards allow you to run 3D Vision Surround Gaming if you wish. The GeForce GTX460 is an awesome card for this price point outperforming the ATI Radeon HD 5830 in virtually every respect and giving extra features that the other card doesn't support. This is a serious contender for NVIDIA as it competes very well in this price range and for that it gets our Hot Product Award.

ASUS's ENGTX 460 cards are high performance non-reference versions of the 460 and perform great. As far as SLI or CrossFire setups are considered, this is one to seriously consider, it gets an Editors Choice for that category.

With the ability to increase the Vcore you’re able to squeeze every last MHz out of this video card and ours overclocked very well providing almost 20% more performance for free. The ASUS ENGTX460 768MB TOP lacks a significant factory frequency boost, but ASUS give you the tools to do your own overclocking with Voltage manipulation.

ASUS has made the ENGTX460 TOP 1GB a solid video card. It has a respectable factory frequency boost. The triple 8mm heat-pipes kept the video card cool at factory frequencies and along with Voltage Tweak let us get every MHz we could out of our GPU when we overclocked it.

With that in mind, the ASUS ENGTX 460 DirectCU TOP is the better all-rounder. It might not be as fast as the Galaxy card, but it is appreciably quicker than a reference card and also both the Gigabyte and Sparkle cards. Despite that, it manages to record the lowest operating temperatures. The only chink in its armor is its slightly higher than average power draw figures.

With a price of $229 online at this time, the ASUS GTX 460 DirectCU 1 GB costs as much as the reference design 1 GB version. Considering the overclock out of the box, which results in about 10% performance increase on average, this is an excellent deal. Basically you get a 10% faster card for free. Even if you are looking for the best bang for the buck, which would mean you should get a 768 MB card, the ASUS ENGTX460 is still a better deal. Other than that there is not much to say about this card. It consumes roughly the same power as the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 460 reference design (good), emits about the same fan noise (good), and has enough rendering power to play all current titles at resolutions up to 1680x1050. Overclocking is similar too: we reached maximum clocks of 865 MHz core and 1040 MHz memory which is pretty much what we have seen on the other 10 GTX 460 cards we tested so far.

From the specs, you might dismiss the nVidia GTX 460 as an unexceptional addition. However the 460’s raw speed in gaming goes beyond theoretical figures. Almost competing with the ATI Radeon HD 5850, it’s clearly a strong choice in the sub-£200 market. The Asus ENGTX460 TOP is a decent rendition from Asus, and the 1GB versions should be even more impressive.

If you are looking for a card that is going to be able to give you great performance for a lower price point, you should check out the ASUS ENGTX460 TOP. You are going to get a card that has DirectX 11 support giving you the ability to play the newest game titles and allowing you to game with all of the features available with the new game engines. The ASUS ENGTX460 TOP also comes packed with some other good features such as the cooling solution that ASUS has decided to attach to the card. The large cooler installed on the ENGTX460 TOP has a large base that is made up of three heatpipes flattened out and polished down to the copper innards of the heatpipe giving them direct contact with the GPU core for maximum heat transfer from the GPU to the heatsink.

It used to be that PC video games such as Crysis and Far Cry 2 were as demanding as you could get, but that was all back before DirectX-11 brought tessellation and to the forefront of graphics. DX11 now adds heavy particle and turbulence effects to video games, and titles such as Metro 2033 demand the most powerful graphics processing available. NVIDIA's GF100 GPU is their first graphics processor to support DirectX-11 features such as tessellation and DirectCompute, and the GeForce GTX-460 offers an excellent combination of performance and value for games and professional applications alike.

Defining product value means something different to everyone. Some readers take heat and power consumption into consideration, while others are only concerned with FPS performance. With regard to value, there are several ways to look at the $200 GeForce GTX 460 768MB GDDR5 version and compare it to the closest rivals: such as the $200 ATI Radeon HD 5830. In terms of product price to FPS performance, the GeForce GTX 460 is one of the most affordable DirectX-11 video card products available. The ASUS ENGTX460/2DI/768MD5 GeForce GTX 460 768MB video card is available at NewEgg for $200. There are also several other options to consider: