Overclocking
Since you buy your overclock when you buy the ZOTAC AMP! Edition, it makes no sense to mess with a perfectly stable and reasonable overclock backed by a lifetime warranty. However, the MSI N460GTX in comparison is cheap as chips. We got the card to a monster 895MHz core clock with the voltage cranked and the fan cranked for good measure, though after experimenting a little more, it really didn’t need to be at 100%. This card was completely stable through our entire suite of benchmarks beginning to end.
While we’re sure that the ZOTAC could go a little further, it’s kind of silly to spend extra money for an overclock when you aren’t going to leave well enough alone. In that case, I’d recommend the non-AMP! edition which is priced a little less. But for today, we’ll test the store bought overclock of 810 MHz as is.
Synthetic Benchmarks
There’s a place for synthetic benchmarks in all testing. They give us a rough idea of how things will play out as we progress through out testing with other real world benchmarks. If something is out of whack, we can quickly check back to our synthetic benchmarks to see if we need to test again. We start off our testing with a few of the greatest hits…
3DMark06
At stock clocks, the MSI is no match for the ZOTAC. But once you overclock it, the MSI is now within 50 marks from the much more expensive ZOTAC. It also takes a chunk out of the stock clocked HD 6850, but the overclocked HD 6850 wins the day in this DX9 benchmark.
3DMark Vantage
Moving along to our DX10 synthetic benchmark of choice, we see that the overclocked MSI N460GTX is that much closer to the ZOTAC AMP! Edition. Both GTX 460’s trump the HD 6850 both stock and overclocked so we expect some interesting things during our DX10 benchmarks.
Cinebench 11.5
Cinebench 11.5 definitely pushes the brute force rendering aspects of a GPU using OpenGL. And with that in mind, we see that the HD 6850 powers away at stock clocks, and further away overclocked. Back to the GTX 460s for a sec and you will see that the MSI and ZOTAC are within a frame of eachother. Clearly the card you want for rendering is not a GTX 460.
Heaven Demo 2.1
Heaven is a really great benchmark because you can literally watch it run all day long. It really is a beautiful benchmark and gives you a good idea of performance in titles that favour tessellation. The GTX 460s do very well both regular and overclocked against the HD 6850 but things get weird when we hit OpenGL. The HD 6850’s commanding lead in Cinebench’s OpenGL results gets clawed back in this benchmark. Also strange is the DX9 performance of the ZOTAC’s performance in DX9 over a stock clocked 1GB reference GTX 460. We’ll definitely have to head to the other benchmarks to really clear this up.
Now that the preliminary synthetics are out of the way, let’s see how this translates to the benchmarks based on real games and apps.