Overclocking

To find the maximum overclock of our card we used a combination of GPUTool and our benchmarking suite.
The overclocks listed here were achieved with the default fan and voltage settings as defined in the VGA BIOS. Please note that every single sample overclocks differently, that's why our results here can only serve as a guideline for what you can expect from your card.



The overclocks of our card are 905 MHz core (6% overclock) and 1065 MHz Memory (6% overclock). To be honest, I didn't expect to see much of an additional overclock from a card that is already running 27% overclocked beyond the reference design specifications. It seems the TGT binning process is working really good and picking great cards.

I also took a look at operating voltages of the card, which is at 1.10V on our sample. This means that Point of View did not simply bump the voltage on their card to get better clocks out of it. This provides an easy (but costly) way for hardcore overclockers to find the really well overclocking GTX 460 cards, to put them under more extreme cooling to shatter some records.

Overclocked Performance

Using these clock frequencies we ran a quick test of Call of Duty 4 to evaluate the gains from overclocking.


The actual 3D performance gained from overclocking is 5.4%.

Temperatures

Idle temperatures are perfectly fine and low. Under load the card reaches higher temperatures than other GTX 460 cards, which is understandable because of the much higher clocks. Even with the nice additional overclocking, temperatures stay in a perfectly safe range.

Clock Profiles

Modern graphics cards have several clock profiles that are selected to balance power draw and performance requirements.
The following table lists the clock settings for major performance scenarios and the GPU voltage that we measured. We measure on the pins of a coil or capacitor near the GPU voltage regulator.