Introduction

NVIDIA's latest member of their DirectX 11 lineup is the GeForce GTX 460. It is based on the all new 40 nm GF104 GPU which is based on the Fermi architecture introduced earlier this year. The GTX 460 is positioned at the lower end of the mid-range performance segment around the $200 price bracket. NVIDIA offers two variants of the GeForce GTX 460, one with 768 MB of GDDR5 memory and one with 1 GB. Due to the GPU architecture this change in memory size not only affects the actual memory but also other performance relevant figures. The reduction of memory size is achieved by installing less memory chips on the card which reduces the bus width of the GPU from 256-bit to 192-bit on the 768 MB version. Since the ROPs are coupled to the memory interface this also results in less ROP units. Combined all those changes reduce the fillrates and memory performance of the card by 25%.

ASUS has released their ENGTX460 DirectCU as a high-clocked alternative to the reference designs using their DirectCU cooling solution. The card comes at clock speeds of 775 MHz core and 1000 MHz memory, which is in the upper half of the available out-of-the-box overclocks from all board partners (some go as high as 850 MHz). With a price of $229 the ASUS GeForce GTX 460 DirectCU 1 GB is also quite affordable.

Packaging

The ASUS packaging is fairly big and comes with several eye catchers on the front. "Voltage Tweak up to 50% faster" seems a bit overoptimistic to me, though

Contents

You will receive:

• Graphics card
• Driver CD + Quick Install Guide
• Leather CD/DVD case
• PCI-Express power cable
• DVI adapter + mini-HDMI to HDMI adapter

The Card

Most of you have already seen the ASUS DirectCU cooler from a variety of their other cards. This time the cooler is in blue with white stripes which does look nice - just not like an NVIDIA card, but I'm not complaining.


The ASUS GTX 560 DirectCU uses two slots, just like the NVIDIA reference design.


The card has two DVI ports, and one Mini-HDMI port (Mini-HDMI to HDMI adapter is included). 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) - and use them all at the same time. On NVIDIA cards you can use only two displays at the same time, so for a three monitor setup you would need two cards.

NVIDIA has included an HDMI sound device inside their GPU which does away with the requirement of connecting an external audio source to the card for HDMI audio. The HDMI interface is HDMI 1.3a compatible which includes Dolby TrueHD, DTS-HD, AC-3, DTS and up to 7.1 channel audio with 192 kHz / 24-bit. NVIDIA also claims full support for the 3D portion of the HDMI 1.4 specification 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 cards in SLI for added 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.