The MSI N460GTX Cyclone 1GD5 video card looks great on paper, but how well does that custom Cyclone cooler do in the real world? We take this factory overclocked video card from 725MHz on the GF104 'Fermi' GPU core well past 900MHz, so it looks like it is the real deal. Read on to see what MSI has done with the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 460 1GB video card with their custom cooled N460GTX Cyclone!

The MSI N4600GTX Cyclone 1GD5 video card was found to be about 6% faster than the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 460 1GB reference card. The MSI N4600GTX Cyclone 1GD5 features a 50MHz boost on the GPU core clock and that was enough to give it the performance boost needed to beat out the reference card in the performance tests that we ran. It was interesting that MSI didn't overclock the 1GB GDDR5 memory chips at all, as other companies are putting slight overclocks on the memory. It really doesn't matter though as we were able to overclock the MSI N4600GTX Cyclone 1GD5 video card all the way up to 915MHz on the core! This is a 240MHz overclock from NVIDIA's reference design and that is rather massive. When overclocked this high the MSI N4600GTX Cyclone 1GD5 is performing faster than a stock clocked GeForce GTX 470 and just behind the Radeon HD 5870 in benchmarks like 3DMark Vantage...