This is a video card that's been highly anticipated and has received fantastic
reviews across the web. This is the GeForce GTX 460. And this particular
version is not your run-of-the-mill GTX 460. Now, I've received a lot of
requests over the uh time that I've been doing my unboxings and blog videos to
take a look at cards that don't feature the reference NVIDIA or ATI design.
Well, I'm finally doing it. This is another non-reference card. I looked at
another one recently. So, this features MSI's cyclone cooler. It also has their
military grade, sorry, military class components. So, you can see here that
includes the high conductive capacitors, solid capacitors, solid state chokes, as
well as no buzz. And this is a really interesting thing for them to call out
because I've seen a lot of complaints over the last few years with many
high-end cards that as soon as you start to play a game, you hear like a whine or
a buzz. And that's from this style of choke. With a solid state choke, a
well-built one, and a well-designed PCB, you can eliminate that noise so that if
you have a quiet fan, you hear zero
noise from your graphics card. So, that's something I'm definitely going to take a look at when I actually get this
video card out of the box and running. They are also talking about MSI
Afterburner, which is a terrific utility co-developed by MSI and Revet Tuner.
It's my overclocking utility of choice. You've probably actually seen me use it
in a couple of videos, even featuring other brands of graphics cards because
it works great. And then let's have a look at what else we've got.
Uh oh, okay. Cameraman wants to look at
that for a while. You can pause it if you want to read that, I suppose. Uh, you know what? Let's start getting the
card out of the box and then I can talk about some of the other bullet points that make this particular one special.
MSI does include a three-year warranty with their graphics cards. And
so, wow, my box fell apart. Look at that. Hopefully they have a warranty on
the box, too. Haha. Wow. I like I unboxed it like more than usual. Huh.
Okay. Well, there you can see the box and it's all all of its glory. Just like
that. Okay. So, let's get the card open
here. In terms of accessories, we've got pretty standard fair. We have a DVI to
VGA adapter, a DVI to HDMI adapter.
We've got uh two Molex to six pin PCI
Express power adapters. And then we have a graphics card. Now, this is an odd
one. Oh, no. There it is. I was going to say there's no driver disc. I don't have
to tell you not to use it and to throw it away, but there it is. Throw it away.
And then we've got a quick users guide.
So, that's going to show you how to install your graphics card, tell you a
little bit about it, show you how to install the drivers. Okay. And then the
last thing we have here is something about the 460 GTX series.
So installing MSI live update. Oh, okay. So this is their automatic driver update
feature. MSI live update. So they're just giving you some instructions on how
to use that. Let's take it
out of the anti-static wrap
here and have a look at this very highly anticipated card. So
here we have it. This is the MSI GTX
460. This is a 1 gig over factory overclocked card featuring their Cyclone
cooler. So, the Cyclone cooler, here's an interesting that I noticed about it,
and I actually talked about this in my other GTX 460 unboxing is you see the
shape of this cooler. I called out that it looks a lot like a stock Intel
reference cooler. And what I didn't realize is that why NVIDIA is probably
using this in their reference design cards is because MSI has been using this
exact Cyclone heat sink for a couple generations now and it does a really
good job. Now, the difference between the Cyclone and the stock cooler is a
the Cyclone doesn't have a shroud, so you actually get slightly better
performance that way because everything's exposed to the open air in your case. And the second thing is that
it actually has a couple of heat pipes in addition to the uh to the fins on the
bottom that carry up to a couple more fin banks that are going to benefit from
some of the incidental air flow from this fan. So, it's going to blow down,
but it's also going to have a lot of air going out this way, and that's going to
take away a lot of the heat that these heat pipes carry out to the fins on the
sides there. Cameraman is having a nice look
at the cooler. I mean, the Cyclone cooler is really uh one of the big
talking points about this card because and I'm going to do some testing on it,
but MSI's claims are that it is up to
15.7% quieter under load and also that
it will cool much better at that same uh
quieter level. That was really awkward. Okay, it cools better and it's quieter
there. That's easy. It has a 90 mm fan,
so a 9 cm PWM controlled fan. So that
means that even at very low speeds, it will manage to start itself up, which is
the problem with nonPWM fans. It
has Yeah, I think that's pretty much everything else I wanted to say about
it. Okay, let's have a look at the card itself. This has a PCI Express 16x
interface. It is SLI ready, so you can
use up to two GeForce GTX 460 cards in
SLI. And let's see what we've got for
output options. We have two DVI ports.
and one mini HDMI port on the back of the card. So, that means that you do
have support for up to three monitors in SLI mode. It does support 3D vision
surround. Okay. And then, okay, I'm just
going to take that right off. In terms of power requirements, it's not nearly
as power hungry as many of the other Fermy series cards, but it still does
require two PCI Express six pin connectors on the back. So, if you're
going to run SLI, make sure that you've got four of these babies. And I think
that pretty much covers everything I wanted to say. This is the Cyclone
cooled version of the Okay, I don't know what cameraman's looking at. He wants to
see the back of the card. Okay, cameraman's looking at the back of the
card. I hope you're enjoying this. That's where the GPU is. Uh, you can deduce
that from the fact that, see, I'm I'm running out of things to talk about here. You can deduce that from the fact
that there's a bunch of components on the back of the PCB and also that that
is where the cooler is positioned on the front of the card. Thank you for
checking out my unboxing of the MSI N460
GTX Cyclone 1 gig OC video card.