The Card

MSI uses a slightly customized PCB design together with their own "Cyclone" thermal solution. The large footprint of the cooler makes the two heatpipes stick out a bit above the top end of the card which might become an issue in some smaller cases.


The card occupies two slots in your system.


The card has two DVI ports and one mini-HDMI port (but no mini-HDMI adapter 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), from what we know so far, 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.

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 titles shipping with support for 3D output.


You may combine up to two GTX 460 cards in SLI for added performance or improved image quality settings. I find it a bit surprising that NVIDIA did not include a triple or quad SLI option, but it doesn't seem unreasonable considering the strategic positioning of the product.


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.