Point of View clearly impressed me with their GTX 460 TGT Beast. The card comes at amazing clock speeds of 855 MHz core and 1005 MHz memory. What makes it even more impressive is that they can do this on a reference design card. Where other board partners need expensive coolers and redesigned PCBs, Point of View simply used a clever binning process to enable this product. I am quite certain that Point of View is shipping boatloads of GTX 460 cards to TGT who then test every single card for the maximum clocks it can run. Cards are then sorted into "bins" corresponding to products. The same is happening at every GPU and CPU manufacturer on a silicon level. Based on my review sample I can also confirm that Point of View did not simply increase the GPU operating voltage to reach their target clock speeds, which would have resulted in higher power consumption and potentially reduced lifetime of the chip.
Another surprise for me was that additional overclocking was possible. I expected the card to be close to its maximum clock limit, but my sample went to 905 MHz GPU clock without any voltage increase. This is clear evidence that the GPU on the GTX 460 TGT Beast overclocks significantly better than all the other GTX 460 cards I have tested so far.
All this comes at a price though. With a retail price of around $280 this card is expensive - when compared to other GTX 460 cards. Another comparison one could make though is against the GTX 470. The GTX 470 is only 2% faster than the card tested today, but costs $70 more! With some manual extra overclocking you could even reach HD 5870 levels, that's a $400 card. But you could also grab the cheapest GTX 460 768 MB you can find on the market which is $170, overclock it to the max. where it will probably reach 850 MHz, roughly the same clock as the Point of View TGT Beast. But that takes knowledge, time and effort. If you have the cash and simply want the fastest out-of-the-box GTX 460 that money can buy, go for the Point of View GTX 460 TGT Beast.