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.