Palit GeForce GTX 460 Sonic (1024MB GDDR5) Pro Reviews

Palit has done a great job combining the popular and flexible GeForce GTX 460 GPU with a custom design and highly overclocked settings to create a mid-range graphics cards that offers next-level performance for a price that is much more manageable for the everyday gamer. If you have been looking for an upgrade path in the $250 price range then the Palit GTX 460 1GB Sonic Platinum card is a fantastic option!

Nvidia has done an excellent job with the GeForce GTX 460 and it’s the first graphics card from the green camp that we have genuinely been excited about from the get go in quite some time. At its factory overclocked speeds, we found the Palit GTX 460 Sonic Platinum to deliver roughly the same performance of the GeForce GTX 470 which costs considerably more, consumes more power and is louder. Moreover, when compared to the Radeon HD 5850, the GTX 460 Sonic Platinum was more often than not the faster board, all while saving you a hundred bucks in the process.

While you can do overclocking yourself, Palit is offering us a massive out of the box overclock and for only slightly more money. If you can't be bothered learning or just overclocking, then it's a fantastic option. We're not talking about a company throwing the OC label on a model and having a 15MHz overclock. What makes this one stand out a bit more than the MSI and GIGABYTE GTX 460s we looked at is the fact the company has also decided to up the memory speed.

If you are the kind of user who simply wants to install a graphics card, install the drivers and start gaming without doing any further tweaking, then the Palit GeForce GTX 460 Sonic Platinum is definitely an excellent choice. Its massive out of the box overclock of 800 MHz core and 1000 MHz memory can result in a substantial performance improvement compared to the reference design which runs at 675 / 900 MHz (core/memory). Palit has also chosen to equip their card with 1 GB of GDDR5 memory. Compared to the 768 MB GTX 460 cards this yields an additional performance increase, even though the difference is small when compared to the price increase. Palit has priced their card at $249 which is $20 more than the 1 GB reference design. Considering you will see over 20% of performance gained for $20, the price increase is more than justified, it actually makes the card a better deal than the reference design when looking at price/performance. However, the GeForce GTX 460 with 768 MB is still a better deal in that scenario.