Why you can trust TechRadar We spend hours testing every product or service we review, so you can be sure you’re buying the best. Find out more about how we test.
Select your benchmarks just right and you can happily say that this twin-GPU EVGA GeForce GTX 460 2Win outperforms a the EVGA GTX 580 Superclocked.
You can say it happily, but you surely can't say it without feeling slightly guilty at putting so much spin on it.
A clear gauge for the game graphics and image processing power that's on offer with the EVGA GTX 580 SC and this inbred child from a family of Nvidia GTX 590s is the Heaven benchmark.
Forget the CPU, motherboard or any other component in your system, Heaven ignores all of them and just harasses the graphics card. The result puts the plain ol' GTX 580 ahead of the GTX 460 2Win.
It's not so simple with Dirt 3 and Just Cause 2, though, as the twin-GPU card takes the wins there. But those two titles represent the only SLI (Scalable Link Interface) win in our test suite.
We're comparing it to the EVGA GTX 580 Superclocked – a factory overclocked card – but we found both for the same price. The GTX 580 Superclocked is only 25MHz faster than a vanilla GTX 580 so it's not posting wildly different performance figures.
If you're looking to spend this sort of cash on a graphics card then you are going to be looking for it to cope with the toughest graphical tests that you can throw at it.
The GTX 580 is the top single-GPU card you can pick up at the moment, and Metro 2033 is the top system-stressing benchmark at the top-end.
The extra tessellation and post-processing demands of Metro 2033 at 2560 x 1600 are incredibly GPU-intensive, and none of Nvidia's cards below the GTX 580 can get into double figures, even with an SLI.
So if you want the best visuals and the best speeds then for this sort of cash you've got to buy the best single-GPU you can, not a pair of weaker chips.
We liked
The fact that EVGA has put one of the top SLI pairings onto a single slab of PCB is impressive, and for those without SLI-capable motherboards it gives them access to something they wouldn't otherwise have.
EVGA has also slightly overclocked the GF 104 GPUs in the GeForce GTX 460 2Win graphics card, not down-clocked as with other multi-GPU cards.
We disliked
You can pick up an overclocked GTX 580 from the same company for the same price, and standard GTX 580s for much less. In fact you can buy two GTX 460s, clock them up to the same speeds (or higher) than the EVGA GeForce GTX 460 2Win edition for a lot less, too.
Adding in a second GTX 460 to an existing system is worth the cash, but paying over the odds for a weaker GPU setup than a single card in one fell swoop makes no sense.
Final verdict
As a technical achievement, the EVGA GeForce GTX 460 2Win is impressive, but it's far too expensive compared to a standard GTX 460 SLI pairing or a vanilla GTX 580.
The EVGA GeForce GTX 460 2Win is available from Aria PC
