NVIDIA GeForce GTX 460 Review

NVIDIA® GeForce® GTX 460 delivers revolutionary levels of price/performance. With up to 4x the DirectX 11 tessellation performance of the competition*, GeForce GTX 460 packs highly detailed visuals into your games - without sacrificing high frame rates. And with NVIDIA® 3D Vision™, PhysX®, and CUDA™ technologies, GeForce GTX 460 powers all the incredibly realistic effects that your games can throw its way.

At the beginning of this evaluation, we received two reference cards from NVIDIA. We received one of each version of the GTX 460: a 1GB version and a 768MB version. Since they are both reference cards, they both come with the GPU clocked at 675MHz, the CUDA cores clocked at 1.35GHz, and the memory clocked at 3.6GHFrom the front, these video cards look identical. In fact, when we took them out of the box in which they were shipped, the only way we could tell them apart was that one of them has an NVIDIA logo sticker on the fan hub, and the other does not. In the first photo above, the GTX 460 768MB is on the bottom, and the 1GB version is on the top. On the back side, the 768MB model had significantly more stickers and looked clean and new. The 1GB version has just a few stickers, and it looks like it has been handled quite thoroughly.The GeForce GTX 460 looks like a very small version of the GTX 470. It has NVIDIA’s standard high-gloss black plastic heat-sink shroud complete with NVIDIA logos, and a large 80mm fan centered on the shroud. The video card features two 6-pin auxiliary power supply connectors and a single SLI bridge. Tri-SLI is not supported on the GTX 460, so there is some limits in place here with these more budget cards. On the business end, there are two Dual-Link DVI connectors and a single mini-HDMI port.Looking closely at the back of these video cards, there are a few small differences. First, the 1GB version says "Made in USA", while the 768MB says "PCB made in Hong Kong." This is probably just a difference in these reference cards, as we believe that the retail versions will be made in the same facility. Second the 768MB is missing some surface mount components on the back of the PCB, to the left of the GPU bracket, where the memory would be if it was a 1GB version