Do any of you guys and gals have this card? After first hand experience of the terrible Palit Sonic GTX 460 I quickly changed it for this Gigabyte model and boy am I ever glad. The build quality is first class, no way can Palit compete with this. Temperatures are good, around the 70 - 75 mark (South facing room, very hot in the summer anyway!) under very heavy load (Looking at you FurMark) and the fans, can't hear them at all! Probably the most perfect graphics card I have ever played with. Nice little extra touches as well, including dust covers for the two DVI plugs and another for the SLI connector. Mini HDMI to full HDMI adapter included in the package as well. I'm well chuffed, would also be interested to hear if you guys have overclocked this beauty
Gonna see how the mafia 2 demo runs on my comp, I suspect I need a new card and it's a toss up between this and a gainward one, dual fans look good for cooling when ocing, I use headphones when gaming so noise isn't that much of an issue, would be hoping to see 850 to 900 on the core
From my research the Gainward is much the same as the Palit in design. They both lack VRM heatsinks and have a terrible fan. Something I neglected to mention above was that the Palit Sonic (NOT PLATINUM) lacks heatpipes. Simply an aluminium block and a fan, that's how sophisticated the Palit cooling was and the reason I sent it back! I can not over state how well the Gigabyte card is made in comparison. Have not tried overclocking yet but I am certain it will handle temperatures way better than the Palit which actually hit 90 at one point during my brief ownership of that horrible card!
Replacing the EVGA GTX 460 SLI setup in your signature? The whole Gigabyte package is quality rest assured! You going for the 1GB version I assume?
These are words I don't want to hear - the Gainward and Palits are the only shorty GTX460s and I need one less than 19cm for my mITX build. Is this the kind of problem that I can fix with a custom cooler, or do they run deeper than poor cooling?
From personal experience the Palit Sonic is horrible. If you have to buy one then get the higher specification such as the Palit Sonic Platinum. As far as my knowledge goes that is the one that has a heatpipe design which should curtail temps better than a solid aluminum block alone! I believe the Gainward specification you'd be looking for is the GLH (Goes Like Hell). However the fan is the same on all models and when it ramps up you will hear it! I did try a custom cooler myself with a Zalman 950, but alas it didn't work out! Temps just kept going up because the contact point did not fully cover the GPU. Have heard of people using an Arctic Freezer CPU cooler on these cards but it sounds like too much hassle to me.
Just wanted to add a little information here. Been gaming for the past hour on my single Gigabyte GTX 460 and logged a maximum temperature of 65!
I all so had 2 palit 460 sonic platinum in a week both of them had dvi problems and the second one had a bad fan bearing as well Then i got a nice gigabyte 1gb
F***. I'll have to keep my fingers crossed a reputable brand comes out with a short version (I know Asus did shorty 5770s), otherwise I'll have to buy a Palit Sonic/Gainward GLH secondhand and do some cooler replacement. D'you reckon I could cool a GTX460 and an i7 860 on a single 140mm rad?
I'm very pleased with this card. Cool, silent*. Very noticeable improvement from my 7900 (yeah, really). Great card. Except for one thing: Just for fun, I installed the Folding@home GPU client after reading the article reviewing the cards. I wasn't planning on Folding with it, but thought it might be a good way to help keep my room a little warmer in the winter. As soon as the client launches and it actually starts crunching numbers, there's a very noticeable, VERY ANNOYING high pitched whining sound. I immediately close the client, thinking my computer is going to explode, and the whining stops. I did a bit of digging, and found that this could be the case in maybe 30-40% of new higher end graphics cards. Making it "normal." Suggestions to 'fix' it included using a headset to game with, or turning the fans up on the card. Not because the card is getting to hot, but to drown the sound out. Really? Now I skipped a fair number of generations of cards going from a 7900 to this, but has this really become common? Is it never mentioned in any reviews because it's just a given? Anyway, now I'm starting to vent, which wasn't my intent. So, I'll just ask if anyone else has run into this? With this card, or with another?
I keep wondering how much of an upgrade this card would be over my 4870, and whether it's worth it...
It's a byproduct of NVIDIA's decision to use analogue power hardware instead of digital. AFAIK (I'm not an AMD owner) ATI 'cards don't whine, because they use newer digital power management systems, but NVIDIA's reference designs persist with analogue. As a result, especially under high initial load (when ramping up a game, or F@H, for example), you get high-frequency vibration which you can hear as a high-pitched whine. My GTX-280 whines for about ten seconds as graphics-intensive games load; it may well be that yours will stop after a short period too...
My 5850 does it too, drives me up the wall as it's by far the loudest thing in my system when I'm gaming and the whole reason I went watercooling was to make it silent. I was mulling over moving to Nvidia as I hadn't heard any reports of it on the Fermi cards. Don't know if anyone can confirm if this is true or not?
I have 2 Zotac 470's and I don't have any issues with a whining sound from either card. Where as the 295 card I have has this whine coming from it also.
Just a heads up, this card is now £173.89 at Scan under their Today Only special offer section. http://www.scan.co.uk/TodayOnly/Index.aspx