ASUS ENGTX 460 1GB review

We already established with our Zotac review that the new Nvidia GeForce GTX 460 is one hell of a mainstream card and pretty much the best value for money in the market right now. So henceforth the battle begins as to which brand provides the best bang for your buck.

This week we look at the ASUS ENGTX460 1GB, the overclocked version of the standard GTX 460. The big selling point for the ENGTX460, according to ASUS, is the Voltage Tweaking ability to allow for even more overclocking headroom. Accompanying the AED 1,200 ($ 277) graphics card is your standard molex to 6-pin power cable (even though the card itself needs 2x 6-pin power plugs) and a DVI to VGA as well as a DVI to HDMI connector.  Packed along the hardware is the manual with a driver disc containing the ASUS SmartDoctor and GamerOSD overclocking software.

The premium price tag on the ENGTX460 1GB, in addition to the overvoltage feature, can be attributed to the high clock speeds on the card: 775MHz Core and 1000MHz Memory compared to the reference card speeds of 675MHz Core and 900MHz Memory from Nvidia.

So moving right along, our testbed comprises of an Intel 965 EE Quadcore CPU @ 3.2GHz with 3GB Corsair DDR3-1333 RAM on the Gigabyte X58A-UD9 motherboard. Nvidia’s latest drivers, ForceWare 258.96 was used for testing the ENGTX460 1GB.