Today we're going to be unboxing a very exciting product from EVGA. This is the
GeForce GTX 460. So that is 20 less than
the GTX 480, 10 less than the GTX 470,
and only five less than the GTX 465. But
the performance of the 460 is actually
very, very close to its big brother, the 465. And it's quite a lot cheaper. Now,
it does have less RAM, so that means at
high resolutions, you might be a little bit limited in terms of running like
huge anti-aliasing on high resolutions, but with the price of this card, you're
probably not going to be running at 2560 x600 with a 30-in monitor anyway. So,
I'm going to go ahead and start breaking the seals here. So the GTX 465 or 460 is
a bit of a change from the other Firmeny based cards in that NVIDIA has actually
reworked the architecture of this card quite a bit. That means that power
consumption is down, heat output is down
and performance is up versus some of the other 400 series cards. It also means
that the price is down. So, this is around $200 US, and that puts it
securely in a sort of uh value
enthusiast gamer price point if such a thing existed. So, here's a little quick
start guide. Next, we have a graphics card user guide. Okay, so that shows us
some super basics. Talks about EVJ's
advanced RMA program. Talks a little bit about their precision software, which is
for overclocking. That's a pretty good value ad as well as EVGA social
networks. Okay, cool. Let's go ahead and put that down.
We've got an EVGA sticker as well as an EVGA driver disc. Don't use this driver
disc. Download the latest off the NVIDIA website. Ooh, that's a nice sticker.
EVGA GeForce GTX 400 GPUs. So, I could
put it there if I wanted to, but I don't. Next, let's go and have a look at
the card itself. So, I haven't seen an EVGA box like this before. It looks like
they've redesigned things a little bit. In terms of accessories, we've got a
mini HDMI to HDMI dongle. We have a dual
Molex to one PCIe 6 pin dongle. Then we
have two Molex to one PCIe 6. Okay, so we have two of those. Then we have a DVI
to VGA adapter. And that's it. Then we
have the card itself. It's quite a bit smaller than the G other GTX 400 series
cards because all of the other cards despite having different model names are
based on the same core and most of them are even based on the same PCB even if
the coolers are slightly different. This one however is based on a much smaller
PCB. So it ends up being a much smaller card and it's also a smaller core. So
you can see where the uh where the GPU core actually is on the back of the GPU.
Back of the video card. See GPU and video card. I use these terms interchangeably, but the GPU is actually
the graphics processing unit there. And
the video card is the whole thing with a PCB, which in this case is black, a GPU
on it, RAM on it, all that good stuff. So at the top, we're going to find an
SLI connector. It is SLI ready, but it does not support 3-way SLI because for
three-way SLI, you would need two SLI connectors. We have an 80 mm fan on the
front, and you can see that it's using a flower style heatsink that is actually
uh here, cameraman, just look at that card for a second. I'll be back. It
actually closely resembles the stock Intel heatsink where you've got a copper
core at the back. And in this case, we can see there is a copper base with a
couple of heat pipes attached to it. And then it's got like this uh radial fin
thing going on. And I've actually seen Intel heat sinks that are shaped exactly
like that. So it looks like uh you know it's a bit of a tribute to Intel's
thermal engineers that yes, that design does work. We've got two heat pipes
coming out here and uh presumably coming
over here where there's more heat sink and over here and presumably coming out
over there. So you can actually see yes there is uh additional heat sink
material past that little uh flower shape and that's having heat transported
to it by the heat pipe. So here we've got PCI Express 16x connector and at the
back of the card it still does pull back a fair bit of power but that's what you
generally expect from a $200 plus gaming card. So you need two six pin PCI
Express connectors. And let's have a look at what we've got in terms
of cameraman. What are you doing? Oh,
you're looking down the shroud. Okay. Well, I haven't looked there yet, so I don't know what's there, but I guess
here, I'll look through the camera, too. Oh, we can see the heat sink. Okay. Hold
on. I'm going to look. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You can see where the heat pipe
attaches to that heat sink in there. Cool. All right. So, let's turn around
and see what we've got in terms of output connectors. So, we have two DVI
and one HDMI connector. Now, this card does support NVIDIA surround as well as
3D vision technology. So, bearing in mind though that you would need two
cards to run surround gaming. So, you can only use two of these three
connectors at any given time. Thank you for checking out my unboxing of the EVG8
GeForce GTX 460 768meg version. Bearing
in mind there is a 1 gig version that will perform slightly better due to
extra memory as well as extra memory bandwidth.
The cameraman pointed out to me this is actually a bumper sticker. So you would
apply it to your bumper like so.