Zotac GeForce GTX 460 768Mb review

• Content:
• Introduction
• Technical specification
• Package content
• Testbed configuration
• Voltages and temperatures levels
• Design features
• Overclocking
• Test results
• Conclusion

Design features

To take off cards’ housing and heatsink you have to remove four screws which tighten the cooling system and the card using backplate:

Copper base of the cooling system is connected to heatsink via two heat pipes:

There is no additional cooling solutions for memory chips and power transistors.
The distance between mounting holes of cooling system is 2.4″x 2″ (6.1mm x 5.1mm) which makes GTX 460 incompatible with majority of modern alternative video card coolers.

The card has GTX 460 reference design board:

GPU is fed through tree-phased power subsystem:

Power transistor specification allows it to operate at temperaturesup-to 125°С. According to documentation, each phase is limited to 30 A.

NCP5388 chip controls GPU voltage:

The same controlleris used in GTX 465 and GTX 470 cards of reference deign — the chip can’t be controlled through I2C bus. As we already know, NVIDIA engineers created VID method to control voltage in Fermi cards.

Memory chips are fed through separate single-phased power subsystem:

Zotac GTX 460 uses same power transistors as reference design GTX 460 board do.
The cards uses Samsung memory chips with the following marking K4G10325FE-HC05:

Chip specification allows it to operate at 4000 MHz (effective) clocks: