# MSI GeForce GTX 460 Cyclone OC 1 GB



## W1zzard (Jul 12, 2010)

MSI's 1 GB version of the GeForce GTX 460 Cyclone uses 1024 MB of fast GDDR5 memory and clock speeds of 728 MHz to make it the fastest GTX 460 variant out there today. With a price of $239, it is only $10 more expensive than the reference design.

*Show full review*


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## OnBoard (Jul 12, 2010)

No thread for the reference 1GB version and this is not linked at the end of the review.

In the box it says 'Voltage adjustment' so it's same as in GTX 470 that you can alter the voltage with MSI Afterburner?
http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/MSI/GeForce_GTX_460_Cyclone_OC_1_GB/images/package1.jpg


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## W1zzard (Jul 12, 2010)

OnBoard said:


> No thread for the reference 1GB version and this is not linked at the end of the review.



umm what?



> In the box it says 'Voltage adjustment' so it's same as in GTX 470 that you can alter the voltage with MSI Afterburner?
> http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/MSI/GeForce_GTX_460_Cyclone_OC_1_GB/images/package1.jpg



yep


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## OnBoard (Jul 12, 2010)

W1zzard said:


> umm what?



Here, no link to comments:
http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/Zotac/GeForce_GTX_460_1_GB/35.html

Not on review thread either:
http://forums.techpowerup.com/forumdisplay.php?f=5

This card has the 36th page now that I commented through above link


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## HillBeast (Jul 12, 2010)

Wow. The first good Fermi. It's actually pretty decent and I can't see why NVIDIA didn't just settle for this as the high end part or at least release this sooner so people didn't get such a bad opinion of the GTX400 series. If this had come out first they could release the 480 as like a 490 or something and say it's uber epic for special cases or something.

Anyways, good to see NVIDIA weren't just dicking around all this time. I take back any negative remarks I've said about the GTX460. Still not as good as I like though. The ECC is just a stupid idea and without it I reckon memory clocks would go way higher.


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## the54thvoid (Jul 12, 2010)

HillBeast said:


> Wow. The first good Fermi. It's actually pretty decent and I can't see why NVIDIA didn't just settle for this as the high end part or at least release this sooner so people didn't get such a bad opinion of the GTX400 series. If this had come out first they could release the 480 as like a 490 or something and say it's uber epic for special cases or something.



They couldn't have brought it out first - they needed to realise GF100 was broken before they could remedy the situation.  Also, i've done some calculations on scaling from Anand's review and it's scaling at roughly 85-90%.  Two of these are good competition (with admittedly slightly lower performance) for a 5970 (at £200 more.)


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## HillBeast (Jul 12, 2010)

the54thvoid said:


> They couldn't have brought it out first - they needed to realise GF100 was broken before they could remedy the situation.



Well the thing is, they must have noticed during testing the product and driver development 'Hey this card is getting pretty hot. Maybe I should tell the engineers about this...'


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## Benetanegia (Jul 12, 2010)

GPUs are not made in 2 days. Work on the GF104 started probably around the time that GF100 was taped out. It's always like that in Nvidia's strategy. Ever since G80 the strategy is always the same, make a GPGPU chip that is good for both consumer GPU market and HPC market, then start work on a refresh that is mostly good as a GPU. For HPC you need wider memory buses and other things that make the chip bulky.

This might look like a bad strategy, but it's not, for them. In HPC Fermi is purportedly selling like hotcakes. Not as many cards as in the consumer GPU market. But the margins in HPC ar easily 10-20x bigger. Meanwile Fermi as a GPU is not that good, but here "good enough" is the strategy: it doesn't matter if the chip is big and margins are lower than Ati cards, since the money from the GPGPU (read G80, GT200, GF100) is going to be made in the HPC and Quadro markets, 6 months later the refresh is released and they start making money on the GPU front. This strategy is better than making two different chips for the different markets, since 90% of what makes a chip a good GPUit also makes it a good stream computing HPC part.

Fermi turned out to be much worse than expected, but it's not the fault of the architecture as can be seen from the GTX460. It was the chip. GF100 could have been better, better meaning that since it's somewhat 50% bigger than GF104, power consumption should have been at most 50% bigger than GF104, that is 150 + 75 = 225w and 100w less than 320w.

Then it would have made a far better GPU and would have fullfilled the "good enough" status that G80 and GT200 did get. GT200 didn't saw a refresh, but that's another story alltogether.




As to the review*s* great work Wizzard. Not 1 but 4 cards tested. This cards are really tempting since I've been waiting for a 200 € (always 200-250 from now on) that could move tesselation at playable framerates. I must resist though, the 384 SP version will probably come soon, and having 15% more shaders and probably be made of binned parts capable of higher clocks, it's going to surpass the GTX470 for sure and maybe even the HD5870. I think I should wait. Not to mention the price drops. I don't feel like I'll need a new GPU until Crysis 2 comes out anyway.


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## eidairaman1 (Jul 12, 2010)

Whats odd is AMD havent even made news about a Product Refresh.


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## SteelSix (Jul 13, 2010)

If I were buying a 460, I think it'd be this one. Sharp card, nice cooler.


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## eidairaman1 (Jul 13, 2010)

SteelSix said:


> If I were buying a 460, I think it'd be this one. Sharp card, nice cooler.



Same exact cooler found on Last Years Products


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## Delta6326 (Jul 13, 2010)

good review i like this 460 the most 
typo 725 and 900


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## Benetanegia (Jul 13, 2010)

Delta6326 said:


> good review i like this 460 the most
> typo 725 and 900 http://img.techpowerup.org/100713/Capture031.jpg



Nah, it's ok. He means stock for the two SKUs, 192bit and 256 bit. Notice how the header does say Geforce GTX460 and not "MSI Cyclone GTX460 OC" or something like that like he usually does in other reviews. There's 2 stock versions and not to many space to include just another one in that chart. The specs are explained throughout the article anyway.


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## pr0n Inspector (Jul 14, 2010)

eidairaman1 said:


> Same exact cooler found on Last Years Products



Do Last Years Products include GTX 460?


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## ktr (Jul 15, 2010)

It is out on the egg: MSI N460GTX CYCLONE 1GD5/OC GeForce GTX 460 (Fermi...

The model number says it is the OC model, but the clocks are at stock. But then again, newegg says is has Tri-SLi support, so I am guessing the spec sheet is wrong, and the model # is correct.

Edit: it is the OC model, newegg fixed the specs.


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## Bot (Jul 15, 2010)

nice review and the card is a keeper


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## Jeffredo (Jul 25, 2010)

Kind of disappointed with this card.  As W1zzard said, its extremely quiet at idle, but once the fan gets past 60% (which is most of the time while gaming) the fan noise is a bit obtrusive in my smallish Lian-Li case.  Once it hits 70% its downright loud.  Its probably not any louder from a DBA standpoint than the GTX 260 it replaced at that speed, but the fan it higher pitched and more irritating to me.  I'm RMAing it to Newegg (unfortunately with the 15% restocking fee) and will give an Nvidia reference design cooler model a try.


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