GTX 460 SE Review Introduction

Last week NVIDIA quietly released their GeForce GTX 460 SE. According to NVIDIA, GTX 460 SE is designed to give a good price-performance level without compromising on memory amount or bandwidth. It retains 1 GB of GDDR5 memory across a 256-bit wide memory interface of the GTX 460 1 GB variant, but has a lower CUDA core count of 288. Clock speeds on the GeForce GTX 460 SE are slightly lower, too.

We talked to several board partners about the GeForce GTX 460 SE and they say that consumers are mostly ignoring the 768 MB GTX 460 due to the reduced memory size and demand an affordable 1 GB GTX 460, which materialized as the GeForce GTX 460 SE.



Architecturally speaking, NVIDIA has disabled a second SM block when compared to the other GTX 460 versions. In return for this decrease in performance, the GTX 460 SE features 1 GB memory which means that the full memory controller is used resulting in higher bandwidth for the GPU of the GTX 460 SE.

Specs-wise Gainward's GeForce GTX 460 SE is a full implementation of the reference design, but Gainward has designed their own PCB and cooling solution to go with the card. Gainward is very close to Palit and focuses on the European market while Palit operates globally - both companies are using the same graphics card designs.

Packaging

Gainward's package has about the typical size for a card in this performance range. The front shows some product highlights, while the back has more general marketing.

Contents

You will receive:

• Graphics card
• Driver CD + Documentation
• PCI-Express power cable
• 25% off Loiloscope coupon

The Card

Gainward's GeForce GTX 460 SE looks almost identical to other GTX 460 variants from Palit and Gainward.


The card requires two slots in your system.


The card has two DVI ports, one analog VGA port and one HDMI port. Unlike AMD's latest GPUs, the output logic design is not as flexible. On AMD cards vendors are free to combine six TMDS links into any output configuration they want (dual-link DVI consuming two links), on NVIDIA, you are fixed to two DVI outputs and one HDMI/DP in addition to that. NVIDIA confirmed that you can use only two displays at the same time, so for a three monitor setup you would need two cards.

An HDMI sound device is also included in the GPU. The HDMI interface is HDMI 1.4a compatible which includes Dolby TrueHD, DTS-HD, AC-3, DTS and up to 7.1 channel audio with 192 kHz / 24-bit output. The new revision also brings support for Blu-ray 3D movies which will become important later this year when we will see first Blu-ray 3D titles shipping.


You may combine up to two GTX 460 SE cards in SLI for better performance or improved image quality settings.


Here are the front and the back of the card, high-res versions are also available (front, back). If you choose to use these images for voltmods etc, please include a link back to this site or let us post your article.