MSI GeForce GTX 460 Cyclone 768MB OC Review

There is no denying the fact that NVIDIA’s GTX 460 has been extremely well received and represents exactly what many were waiting for in terms of performance and price. However, every single board partner stumbling over themselves to release these cards, it is getting a bit hard to distinguish one from another. On the day of launch there were two memory capacities (768MB and 1GB), overclocked and custom cooled products galore and they all retailed within $40 of one another. We don’t envy anyone who steps into this field expecting to make a quick decision but we can help point you in direction…hopefully.

MSI’s products and their graphics cards in particular haven’t been reviewed all that much here at Hardware Canucks but the number of offerings they have is simply staggering. On the higher-end front are the lightning-branded products with Twin Frozr heatsinks and what MSI calls “Military Grade Components”. Slightly lower-end cards are available as well sporting various levels of overclocks along with the usual repertoire of reference-based GPUs. All in all, their lineup is more than complete.

While MSI hasn’t released their GTX 460 Lightning editions yet (we assume they’ll be announced shortly), a number of pre-overclocked SKUs have been introduced as OC Editions. Abstaining from the stock heatsink, MSI is using their excellent Cyclone cooler on these products even though the rest of the design is kept at NVIDIA’s original specifications. These Cyclone OC cards are available in both 768MB and 1GB flavors but in this review we will only be taking a look at the lower-end 768MB version.

Unfortunately, MSI doesn’t have the lifetime warranty that some of their competitors market but with three years of coverage, they should have you covered for the time you intend on keeping this card in your system.

The pricing for the GTX 460 Cyclone OC is currently sitting at $210 USD - a mere $10 more than a reference GTX 460. This also puts it at $10 less expensive than EVGA’s own Superclocked Edition which we reviewed a little while back. Let’s see how this thing performs!