You guys have been able to witness a bit of a goof up with Palit over the past few weeks. The reviews on the Palit GeForce GTX 460 Sonic Platinum edition have been extremely positive in most reviews, including ours in the GTX 460 shootout. Great performance, good cooling and an extremely silent noise level. However earlier on we noticed some reports in our forums that an batch of the Palit GeForce GTX 460 seems to be missing the VRM/MOSFET heatsink.
As a result the cards temperature and noise levels can differ very much. On top of that, the initial batches of this product had a non-tweaked BIOS, making the noise levels of the Sonic Platinum rather loud.
Based on our comments a lot of things happened, a new BIOS series has been released to compensate the noise levels on the retail samples of the Palit GTX 460 series, if you have a GTX 460 from Palit, please download the new BIOS here:
http://www.palit.biz/main/faq_show.php?pc_cate=vga&id=161
This file (includes BIOS) is for all of our GTX 460 models to update a new BIOS. It will automatically update the BIOS if it needs to.
Now last week we requested to Palit to send out a final board so we can check out the retail product ourselves, and not the early engineering sample. Today the card arrived and as such we have updated our GeForce GTX 460 review. The sample we received is equal tot he ones in the stores, and has that very latest BIOS. The results are by far less worse then I expected. Temperatures on the final board are a little higher as well as the noise levels. Still this card remains to be one of the best GTX 460 pre-overclocked products out there. As promised (also already integrated in our article) here are the final numbers:
You will notice that the overall PEAK temperature went up 5 degrees towards 79 degrees C. Though a little on the high side, that is a normal temperature. Unfortunately the VRMs can not be measures temperatures wise on this product. Fan RPM was tweaked with the updated BIOS alright and has been set a little higher, as a results under full load we spot a 42 DBa noise level measures at 75cm from the PC. This noise level remains very normal, it means you can hear it, but not annoyingly at all.
With the results updated to the final product, our recommendation stands at it is. The Palit GTX 460 Sonic Platinum edition remains a very lovely product which we can recommend very much. Thanks go out to the end-users who have been reporting their results and opinions here at Guru3D.com and and of course thanks to Palit for working with us, listening to us and to finalize a product that we can recommend wholeheartedly.
