Introduction
Today NVIDIA introduces the latest member of their DirectX 11 lineup. Their new GeForce GTX 460 is based on the all new NVIDIA GeForce GF104 GPU which is based on the Fermi architecture introduced earlier this year. The GTX 460 is positioned at the lower end of the midrange performance segment around the $200 price bracket. NVIDIA offers two variants of the GeForce GTX 460, one with 768 MB of memory and one with 1 GB of GDDR5.
In this review we will test how well two of the 1 GB cards run in SLI. Considering the price this might be an alternative to getting a single GeForce GTX 480, for example. It also give insight into what we can expect from a future NVIDIA dual-GF104 card which is rumored to be released later this year as something like GeForce GTX 495. Unfortunately NVIDIA has removed the possibility to run more than two GeForce GTX 460 cards in triple or quad SLI.
If you haven't done so, please check out our single card reviews to get more details about the cards. This review will focus on performance only, noise and power can simply be estimated by doubling the single card numbers.