New GTX 460 installed... (semi-long w/ a small rant at the top)

First my interesting escapades with Newegg.com... I returned the defective Palit GTX 460. Turns out they were out of stock, so instead of a replacement, I'm to receive a refund. Okay... no problem. The next day comes and I receive my refund... which is short $59.99.

HUH???

The video card came with a coupon good for a 7-day trial of SC2. Apparently, I was supposed to send this FREE COUPON back with the card. Since I did not (BTW the RMA instructions said nothing about sending back the coupon), they felt it was logical to charge me the full list price for a retail version of SC2! Yeah... Homie don't play dat. 45 minutes and 2 supervisors later, I get my money back.

Moral of the story... if you buy ANYTHING that comes with a free ANYTHING from Newegg.com... make sure whatever you bought works BEFORE you use that free item!

ANYWAY!!! On to the reason for my post. I went ahead and purchased the Gigabyte 1gb GTX 460. $20 cheaper than the Palit, and looks/feesl WAY more substantial.

It came with a slight overclock from 675mHz to 715. Well that won't do so I kicked it up to 800mHz. While running the FF14 benchmark the card never went above 68C and the fan was at about 55%... already this thing's running much cooler than my old GTX 260.

Benchmark results, unfortunately, weren't as impressive. On my XFX GTX 260, my benchmark score was 3229 on low, 2417 on high. Not too bad considering I'm running a 2-year old machine with a 2.4gHz quad-core.

New benchmark scores with the GTX 460, all other stats on computer the same, comes to 3499 on low, 2674 on high.

So... not a huge gain, but IMO my processor is bottle-necking the card. I may try to overclock my CPU to about 2.8gHz (I've seen ppl OC the same CPU up to 3gHz without a voltage change so 2.8 should be cake), and try the benchmark again to see if it makes any difference... if it yields any substantial improvement I will let y'all know.

I believe XIV is going to be pretty CPU-intensive, so overclocking your processor might help a bit.

When I first upgraded my system to a hexacore processor, Windows initially only recognized two cores. I ran the benchmark and was pretty underwhelmed by the score. However, after I corrected the problem within Windows and utilized all six cores, my benchmark score skyrocketed.

Good to see you finally got your problems solved.

How do you make Windows 7 recognize all the cores of a CPU?

From what I hear FFXIV on low settings depends on the CPU and on high its all GPU dependent. Also I can guarantee you that your CPU is bottle-necking your GPU now, as I had a similar issue when I upgraded to the GTX 275, and was still on my my AM2 3.0ghz. After I upgraded to the AM3 3.2Ghz and a new MB I saw a huge performance gain in everything I played, so definitely do that when ya can.

Sure is a whole lot of trouble you went through for such a small gain on the benchmark, but regardless you'll be able to run XIV just fine. On low/medium my GTX 275 runs it quite well even with over 50 players on screen and in towns. Though I am quite eager to get the GTX 475 when that releases if not better just cause...hehe Depending on the price I may consider even waiting on the GTX 485 or even 495 since I can run XIV fine as is...and it may get even better with beta 3 improvement soon...shall see.

Don't be afraid to bring that q6600 to 3 ghz. Plenty of overclocking sites show it having great tolerances.

An after market heatsink is always nice, but if you're seeing full load temps lower than 70 celcius, it isn't all that necessary.

Hehe I absolutely start flipping out when my temp gets above 40 celcius, which is hardly ever. I can't fathom being above 38..I'd have an aneurysm.

~V

Vexia Ravenlocke wrote:

Hehe I absolutely start flipping out when my temp gets above 40 celcius, which is hardly ever. I can't fathom being above 38..I'd have an aneurysm.

~V

lol.. If you were keeping hamsters in your computer case, I'd understand. ;) My own cores idle @ 26-28 degrees and can hit 60 when in sustained 100% use. Freaked me out too at first, but that's actually within acceptable parameters for my CPU. Things will only get better the lower the nm count.

I'll be trying to OC up to about 3 gHz tonight. From what I've seen online this will not be too hard on my CPU (I'ts a Q6600). The heatsink that came stock in my XPS is a beast with a rather large fan inside the heat sinks, and I've never had that thing overheat.

I also have a big Noctua fan that I was planning on putting in as an exhaust fan, which from what I've seen dramatically lowers CPU temps for other guys with this XPS case (XPS 630i). I'll fiddle with things tonight and see how it turns out.

Corday Rynir wrote:

New benchmark scores with the GTX 460, all other stats on computer the same, comes to 3499 on low, 2674 on high.

Hrm, just noticed that my GTX 275 is getting a higher score than your new 460, and even this new FFXIV Benchmark Calculator says its slightly higher and your score may not go any higher...hrm {making new post for it}

Corday Rynir wrote:

I'll be trying to OC up to about 3 gHz tonight. From what I've seen online this will not be too hard on my CPU (I'ts a Q6600). The heatsink that came stock in my XPS is a beast with a rather large fan inside the heat sinks, and I've never had that thing overheat.

I also have a big Noctua fan that I was planning on putting in as an exhaust fan, which from what I've seen dramatically lowers CPU temps for other guys with this XPS case (XPS 630i). I'll fiddle with things tonight and see how it turns out.

Noctua makes awesome cooling gear. I have their NH-C12P SE14 cooler and it just blew my stock cooler out of the water. Can't beat their beefy 140mm fans.

Khalus Akuhei wrote:

Corday Rynir wrote:

New benchmark scores with the GTX 460, all other stats on computer the same, comes to 3499 on low, 2674 on high.

Hrm, just noticed that my GTX 275 is getting a higher score than your new 460, and even this new FFXIV Benchmark Calculator says its slightly higher and your score may not go any higher...hrm {making new post for it}

I'm not entirely convinced that calculator is accurate, simply because it does not factor in enough other computer specs (CPU speed, RAM, etc). For instance, I typed in my benchmark score of 3229 with the GTX260, and it says my projected score with a GTX460 should've been 3764.

It also believes my benchmark with an ATI 5970 would be 6192! I know for sure my computer would bottleneck the 5970 like crazy.

I'll have to see if my score is improved after overclocking my CPU to 3 gHz.

Okay... after overclocking my CPU to 3 gHz and stress-testing on OCCT for a couple of hours, I felt confident that the overclock was stable... at a full CPU load temps never went above 57C...

Ran the benchmark again... I'm now scoring 3843 on low.

Corday Rynir wrote:

Okay... after overclocking my CPU to 3 gHz and stress-testing on OCCT for a couple of hours, I felt confident that the overclock was stable... at a full CPU load temps never went above 57C...

Ran the benchmark again... I'm now scoring 3843 on low.

That`s a significant improvement. Congrats.

Corday Rynir wrote:

I'm now scoring 3843 on low.

I get 3872 on low, with my GTX 275, and its at normal non-overclocked specs. hrmmm

Heck I'm gonna run it again here soon to double check...


Oki, just ran the benchmark again, and I got 4002 on low, and 3233 on high, I did upgrade to the newest nVidia driver last week, and now my score is quite a bit higher than it was last time, and then my high was only 2861.

I still think I'm bottle necked a little... I pushed the GTX 460 up to 835mHz... testing showed artifacts at anything higher. Yielded about 50 more points on the benchmark. I just found out that the nForce 650SLI mobo that's in this POS is only PCI-e x8, not x16. I'm willing to bet that's dragging me down a bit...

All in all... IMO not a bad score for a 2 1/2 year old machine who's only upgrade has been extra RAM and new GPU.

Unfortunately it's difficult to convince my wife that a new i7 965, 12gb of DDR3/1600, two SSDs in RAID 0, another GTX 460, a 1000 watt PSU, new mb, new case, and new 23" monitor are all necessary for my very survival...

It's either cuz she's not into computers like me... or it's cuz our money is better spent on our 2 year old and 8 month old boys...

danged wimmin and their logic...

Don`t stress out for now, you`ll play the game fine...

Maybe you need to start setting up one of those hidden cash stashes. ;)

Free Performance Boost (FPB) for GTX 460 ~ http://www.evga.com/forums/tm.aspx?m=498804

Might wanna check this out Corday if ya havn't seen it yet. Appears to be a very nice update for 460 owners. Maybe it'll help ya score higher on the XIV benchmark!

*EDIT*... looks like it might only work on EVGA boards as it looks to be more like a BIOS update. Mine's a Gigabyte card...