VGA Reviews by stefan @ 2010-12-13
The GTX 460 Black video card from ECS is another product that comes with the high performance Arctic Cooling Accelero Turbo Pro cooler, it's also overclocked from the factory. Its performances are very close to the previously reviewed Calibre X460G and the fan speeds are much lower than the ones from the Sparkle model.
At first I would like to thank ECS for offering me the chance to test out their ECS GeForce GTX 460 Black Edition video card.
"ECS, the Elitegroup Computer Systems, was established in 1987, and is approaching its 23rd year of business. More than two decades, ECS has overcome a great deal of obstacles facing new businesses and has experienced the joy of significant growth and development. Her main focus has expanded to not only motherboards, but also desktop and notebook computers, graphics cards and other mobile products. ECS is strongly committed to develop cutting-edge technology in order to generate innovative products under environmental friendly designs. ECS comprehensive system of quality control provides our clients with reassurance and fosters long term cooperation.
Green Touch, Good Life
ECS commits to protect the Earth by reducing the global environmental loading as the priority of her corporate sustainable strategy. Confronting more and more global environmental impacts; climate change, natural resources depletion and the crisis of ecological imbalance, ECS devotes the Green Solutions for the Earth sustainable development without compromising customer satisfaction. ECS expects bringing people with more Green Touch for a Good Life.
Starting from 2006, ECS has been implementing the “ECS Green Competitive Advantage and Quality Plan” and introduced Green Products through 4-stages of non-toxic management; including non-toxic suppliers, non-toxic material, non-toxic manufacturing & processing, and, non-toxic quality controls. Besides, ECS is recognized under the IECQQC080000 Certification in her two major manufacturing sites in China; Golden Elite Technology at Shenzhen and ESZ at Suzhou. That empowers ECS desire of providing end users with HSF (Hazardous Substance Free) products to ensure a quality green life.
As a top-down decision, ECS dedicates to offering clean and environmentally friendly computer products for consumers through product design, purchase, production, sale and services to the 3R environmental objectives – Reduce, Reuse and Recycle. The ECS engineering teams are engaged to create products under a Green concept by size reduction, product longevity, easy disassembly, recycle potential, substance restriction and energy saving. For example, ECS green motherboards apply to the three environmental directives – the WEEE (Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment) promoted by the European Union; RoHS (Restriction on Hazardous Substance Directive) and EuP (Eco design of Energy-using Products Directive).
Nowadays, ECS integrates Green concept in her daily operation. From the headquarters on Taiwan to worldwide branches, ECS practices energy saving, water recycling, Green data center, planting and so on to reduce greenhouse gas emission for mitigating the climate change. With continuous efforts to conduct business in a sustainable way, ECS recognizes that we are dependent on the Earth and strive to improve the quality of life for people everywhere!
Global Network
The headquarters of ECS is located in Taipei Neihu Technology Park. We have offices in major cities around the world. We are committed to product development and expanding the scale of our business. With our branches all over the Americas, Europe, and Asia, ECS localizes sales and retail in order to provide immediate and convenient service for our customers.
-Taipei, Taiwan
-Tokyo, Japan
-Seoul, Korea
-Wijchen, Netherlands
-Fremont, USA
-Moscow, Russia
-Sao Paulo, Brazil
Manufacturing Sites
ECS adopts a vertical integration structure of design, component manufacturing, and system assembly. At present, ECS has established two manufacturing locations; well-developed supply chain capabilities, and well-monitored production links; and the capacity to adapt to the needs of the ever-changing market.
-Golden Elite Technology (Shenzhen), China
-ESZ (Suzhou), China"
The mid-range GTX 460 is another Fermi GPU from Nvidia; the GPU is redesigned compared to the older 480, 470 or 465 GTX cards, so now we are dealing with a smaller chip, which is implicitly less complicated to manufacture, would get better yields and it also dissipates less heat.
After the cards were launched, we could see two versions entering the market, a cheaper one with 768MB and another with 1024MB. The ECS GTX 460 Black is lower clocked compared to the previously tested Calibre X460G:
Compared with the GF100, the GF104 has only 2 Graphics processing clusters (instead of 4); this traduces in a number of shader multiprocessors cut to a total of eight. Also, the GF104 has only half number of raster and poly-morph engines compared to the GF100.
The memory controllers have also been reduced, from six to two.
However, if we look with more attention on the representation of a SM unit, we can count a total of 48 CUDA cores, opposed to 32 that were in the GF100.
The number of texture units in the SM have been doubled to eight and this gives the GF104 faster texturing capabilities.
The Black GTX 460 video card from ECS is shipped in a medium sized cardboard box; on the front we can see a large battle axe, along with the name of the product and some icons that represent the supported technologies:
On one of the box sides, we can find the main product features along with the minimum system requirements:
The back side contains some more information regarding the supported technologies; on the right side we can see them listed in 8 more languages:
For more added protection, the card along with the rest of the bundle are located in a plain cardboard box:
The box has inside two compartments: the top one holds the bundle and in the second one we can find the video card:
The bundle is consisted of:
-DVI-VGA adapter
-DVI-HDMI adapter
-two PCI-Express 6-pin to MOLEX power cable adapters
-a CD with drivers
The card is completely wrapped in an anti-static bag:
The ECS GTX 460 Black comes installed with the high performance Arctic Cooling Accelero Twin Turbo Pro air cooler:
Both fans have the Arctic Cooling logos in the middle, along with the name of the cooler:
Under the large top heatsink, we can see the copper plate, which makes direct contact with the GPU HSF, along with the heatpipe terminations:
The card uses Samsung K4G10325FE-HC05 memory chips, which are rated at 2000MHz:
Unlike the Calibre X460G from Sparkle, the card does not feature a heatsink on the VRM:
On the back of the card, we can see the 4-wire fan connector, used to power both top fans:
Also here, we can see the 2 6-pin PCI-Express power headers:
On the other side of the card, the 4 large copper heatpipes can be found:
On both sides of the heatsink, we can find its name, embossed:
The back of the PCB of this specific sample did not have any stickers on, but the retail cards have and contain serial numbers, product code names and so on. On the top right side we can find only one SLI connector:
As the previously reviewed GTX 460 from Sparkle, the ECS GTX 460 Black comes with the ON Semiconductor NCP5388 2/3/4 Phase Channel Controller:
The screws that keep the top heatsink fixed on the GPU have springs but do not feature washers to avoid scratching the PCB surface:
The card also comes with two DVI connectors and one miniHDMI:
|
Stefan's Test Setup
|
|
| CPU | Core i7 920 @ 3.2Ghz |
| Cooling | Cogage True Spirit |
| Mainboard | Asrock X58 Extreme |
| Memory | G.Skill F3-12800CL8T-6GBPI PI Series |
| VGA |
|
| Other |
|
With the help of the GPU-Z 0.4.8 utility, we could extract lots of information regarding the video card clocks,memory type, pixel and texture fill rate and so on:
To extract even more information, we have used the AIDA64 utility:
Here are the CUDA capabilities of the Calibre X460:
To find out the IDLE and maximum temperatures, I have used the Furmark utility, with the Stability Test in “Xtreme Burning mode” and let it run for about 15 minutes. To record the temperatures, the GPU-Z utility was used, thanks to its Sensors monitoring tab. The recorded room temperature at the time of testing was 20.6 degrees Celsius:
Before measuring the noise the video card was producing, I have first measured the noise inside the room the tests took place and I found out it was 30dBA (with everything turned off).
The next step was to measure the noise the test system was producing, without the video card installed; the value I have obtained was 34.1dBA. Most of the fans inside the case were turned off, but the CPU (43%) and chipset one (30%).
At all times, the sound meter was placed 8cm under the video card.
The GPU fan was controlled by the latest version of the EVGA Precision software:
As it can be seen from the chart, the noise grows linear with the increase of the fan speed. Increasing the fan over 70% or setting a speed less than 40% was not possible using EVGA Precision:
The 3DMark Vantage scores were calculated by summing up the GPU and CPU subscores.
Here are the Vantage subscores separately:
We first converted the obtained scores/FPS for each benchmark to a percentage in comparison to the highest score (=100%), we then averaged all the benchmark scores per resolution/IQ and the results are put into these charts. So these are relative performance charts in % to the fastest card. (full performance numbers here)
We first converted the obtained scores/FPS for each benchmark to a percentage in comparison to the highest score (=100%), we then averaged all the benchmark scores per resolution/IQ and the results are put into these charts. So these are relative performance charts in % to the fastest card. (full performance numbers here)
Considering that the GTX 460 Black from ECS comes with lower clocks than the previously reviewed Calibre X460G from Sparkle, it scored lower in the tests, but all times it was very close to it. Both cards have the same cooler, but ECS omitted to include an extra little heatsink for the VRM.
Also, ECS has chosen to set much lower fan speeds than Sparkle, to make the card more silent overall; when setting the max fan speed in EVGA Precision (70%), I have recorded 1680RPM, which was lower than the minimum fan setting for the Sparkle model (40%), 1740RPM. Having much lower speeds for the fans pre-programmed in the BIOS reflected in the full load temperatures; for the Sparkle I have obtain a maximum temperature in Furmark of 52 degrees Celsius and the ECS model 61 degrees.
Like for the previous model, I would like to note that the cooling system is tri-slot and it is difficult to install two cards with the same cooling design in SLI.
The MSRP for this product is USD 240, which means about 181.4 Euros, about the same price as the previously reviewed Calibre X460G from Sparkle.
I would like to thank again to ECS for making this review possible.
