KitGuru KitGuru.net – Tech News | Hardware News | Hardware Reviews | IOS | Mobile | Gaming | Graphics Cards
GTX460 is ‘Fermi done right' That's what nVidia wants us to believe after a tough year. On Wednesday 30th September 2009, Jen Hsun Huang stood on a global stage with a ‘Fermi card' in his hand and the watching world was treated to a series of demonstrations. Subsequently, we were told by nVidia that while the card itself was a mock-up, the demos had been generated on Fermi. Given that the vast majority of users will never spend more than £200 on a card, nVidia has been desperately looking forward to launching a competitive Fermi product into the ‘affordable price space'. KitGuru pulls out the spanner and oscilloscope to see if GTX460 delivers.
Today we see the release of the GTX 460, the baby brother in the Fermi series. nVidia says that it consumes less power, generates less heat and has been priced to tackle the HD5830. They are targeting the only card in the 5 series range which (KitGuru feels) is underpowered and overpriced. From the results we've seen in the KitGuru Labs, nVidia can afford to be a bit more confident than that. Quite a bit more.
The GTX 460 is going to hit the UK market at £175 inc vat, a very sweet spot indeed for gamers who still want a viable partner for their swanky 24 inch screen, without having spending a small fortune. We will be having a look at performance from this reference card.
Today however KitGuru is going to be focusing on the eVGA GTX 460 Superclocked Edition which is being released at around £195 inc vat and comes with a hefty overclock on the core (88mhz) and 50mhz (200mhz effective) on the memory.
Here is the current lineup from nVidia with the eVGA Superclocked card included in the mix.
| Model | Geforce GTX 460 768MB | eVGA GTX 460 Superclocked 768MB | Geforce GTX 465 | Geforce GTX 470 | Geforce GTX 480 |
| Graphics Processing Clusters | 2 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 4 |
| Streaming Multiprocessors | 7 | 7 | 11 | 14 | 15 |
| CUDA Cores | 336 | 336 | 352 | 448 | 480 |
| Texture Units | 56 | 56 | 44 | 56 | 50 |
| ROP Units | 24 | 24 | 32 | 40 | 48 |
| Graphics Clock (Fixed Function Units) | 675mhz | 763mhz | 607mhz | 607mhz | 700mhz |
| Processor Clock (CUDA Cores) | 1350mhz | 1526mhz | 1215mhz | 1215mhz | 1401mhz |
| Memory Clock (Clock Rate/Data Rate) | 900mhz/3600mhz | 950mhz/3800mhz | 802mhz/3206mhz | 837mhz/3348 mhz | 924 mhz/3696mhz |
| Total Video Memory | 768MB | 768MB | 1024MB | 1280MB | 1536MB |
| Memory Interface | 192-bit | 192-bit | 256-bit | 320-bit | 384-bit |
| Total Memory Bandwidth | 86.4GB/s | 91.2GB/s | 102.6 GB/s | 133.9 GB/s | 177.4 GB/s |
| Texture Filtering Rate (Bilinear) | 37.8 Gigatexels/sec | 37.8 Gigatexels/sec | 26.7 Gigatexels/sec | 34.0 GigaTexels/sec | 42.0 GigaTexels/sec |
| Fabrication process | 40nm | 40nm | 40nm | 40nm | 40nm |
| Connectors | 2x Dual Link DVI-I1x Mini HDMI | 2x Dual Link DVI-I1x Mini HDMI | 2x Dual Link DVI-I1x Mini HDMI | 2x Dual Link DVI-I1x Mini HDMI | 2x Dual Link DVI-I1x Mini HDMI |
| Form Factor | Dual Slot | Dual Slot | Dual Slot | Dual Slot | Dual Slot |
| Power Connectors | 2x6pin | 2x6pin | 2x6pin | 2x6pin | 1x6pin, 1x8pin |
| Recommended Power Supply | 450 watts | 450 watts | 550 watts | 550 watts | 650 watts |
| Thermal Design Power | 150 watts | 150 watts | 200 watts | 215 watts | 250 watts |
| Thermal Threshold | 104c | 104c | 105c | 105c | 105c |
performance is very good indeed.
Third time lucky, good card, seems to be almost worth the wait
Nice overclocked performance. Seems a reference card would be a good buy and then manually overclocking it to save some money,.
That evga board is really good value for money, under 200? the 5830 I never liked, and I can see why now.
Very good card from nvidia, power consumption is also impressive considering the performance.
I am quite surprised how good this card is, seems to be the top buy now under £200.
It is a tough call to make, spend a bit extra on evga superclocked to get moer performance for sure out of the box, or save some money, get the reference card and hope it overclocks as good. They all seem to overclock well, but you never know by how much until you take it home and trash it.
I think nvidia shares should go up with this one.
Ohhh, I like this card and I never thought id say that about fermi. which to this point has been a power sucking waste of space.
Yeah I agree the power consumption and noise levels are class leading. well done.
Well color me impressed with this one. Wasnt expecting such good performance and temperatures.
Its still not as good as the AMD 5850.
well of course its not as good as the HD5850, that card competes against the GTX465. its about £50 more?
Big release for nvidia, probably their biggest card release for sales in 4 years. It might save their sales in 2010. I know they are struggling.
performance figures are good, read a few reviews and it seems to be sending the HD5830 home in a coffin. its about time we see nvidia competitive again, even if its a mid range sector. the big sales are here and in the 100-150 sector.
thanks for including the HQV Benchmark 2.0 results.
Interesting results, and its good to see nvidia working on their drivers for IQ now in HQV Benchmark 2.0
fermi for the masses methinks. its a very solid product all round. Cant get over how small it is, but it still needs 2 x6 pin connectors.
Figures are good, noise is great, power drain is excellent. size is tiny. Not much to knock, even the price seems competitive.
wow, nvidia leading a price point, hell just froze over !
I like this card a lot. Might pick one up later in the month.
Have one on preorder.
Nice comeback. I’m waiting to see how AMD will respond, and find it hard to speculate on that. AMD can probably lower prices considerably if it wants, but on the other hand if Southern Islands are indeed expected in a couple of months’ time, perhaps it would just wait for that.