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.


Due to a bug in GPU-Z the shaders are reported incorrectly as 224, the correct number is 336.

The overclocks of our card are 835 MHz core (24% overclock) and 1045 MHz Memory (16% overclock). Very nice results here. We have seen core overclocks well over 800 MHz from all the GTX 460 cards that we reviewed today. First this means that it is easy to catapult this card into new performance regions with a few clicks and it also means that NVIDIA's production process is working well, opening up the possibility of future higher clocked versions of the GF104 GPU on faster cards.

Compared to the other cards tested today the Zotac GTX 460 resides on the lower end of the overclocking spectrum, but the differences are small enough to be explained by random spread.

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 21.3%.

Temperatures

Temperatures are low, but given the massive fan noise this is of little value. We also see here that the overclocking does not raise temperatures to critical levels.

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.