Introduction

The GTX 460 Cyclone 768MB cards in SLI have already impressed us, and in more ways than one. Not only does the model perform great in SLI, but it also performs great by itself. We also saw in our $210 Video Card Showdown that its overclock performance was also very strong.

Outside of just the normal FPS numbers and 3DMark scores, though, we see that the MSI Cyclone version in itself is very impressive. It's not the highest overclocked model when pulled out of the box, but its overclock is still impressive. To date we can say that the Cyclone cooler which the series is named after has been our favorite.

There's only one left thing to do; overclock the configuration and run it through our whole mass of benchmarks. The SLI GTX 460 768MB Cyclone setup has been the best valued SLI setup we've ever tested when it comes to out of the box performance. While we'll no doubt be able to increase the value of the setup even more through overclocking, how will it compare to some of the other single GPU cards we have?

Because we've looked at the model from MSI in a bit of detail already, we'll just be getting stuck into the overclock we achieved before going straight into the benchmarks. So skip forward to the next page to see what overclock we ended up with.

Overclocking the MSI GTX 460 768MB Cyclone in SLI

Out of the box the GTX 460 768MB Cyclone from MSI comes in at 728MHz on the core. This is almost 50MHz up on the default 675MHz of the model. As always, we use Afterburner to bump up the voltage, in this case to 1.087v and we overclock the core, Shader and memory clock.

Out of the box the 768MB of GDDR5 memory carries with it a 3600MHz QDR memory clock. We just rounded that off to 4GHz QDR. What you have to remember is when we bump the voltage all we're touching is the core voltage and not the memory one. Ultimately this means adjusting the voltage has little to no effect on our overall memory speed.

As for the core, we moved that to 850MHz which is over 100MHz higher than the default out of the box core that MSI offer us, and compared to NVIDIA it's over 150MHz higher. This of course pushes up the Shader clock which went from 1455MHz to 1700MHz.

These clocks where achieved on both cards, so hopefully we'll see quite the performance boost over the default SLI setup we tested recently. Today we opted to leave the fans at Auto as opposed to 100% which we normally do, only because we wanted to see what clocks we could achieve with the fan set like this.