Gigabyte GeForce GTX 460 1GB SE Video Card Unboxing & First Look Linus Tech Tips
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2011-05-08
·
1,405 words · ~7 min read
0:00
So today we're going to be having a look at the GeForce GTX 461 gig but there's
0:06
something here that you need to make a note of this is the
0:10
SE which uh in computer terms it usually
0:14
stands for uh slightly reduced Edition
0:18
so the GTX 461 gig SE actually performs at low
0:24
resolutions similarly to the GTX 460 768
0:29
mix but performs a little bit better at
0:32
higher resolutions so it's a bit of a it's a bit of an oddball part and not
0:37
all of the NVIDIA board Partners even came out with one this is a Gigabyte
0:41
card by the way and so all of the board Partners were given free rign there's no
0:45
reference design so they were given free reign to design it however they wanted
0:48
so this is the Gigabyte version that's what we're going to be having a look at today let's start with the packaging it
0:53
is like all GeForce GTX 460s 3D Vision
0:58
ready Cuda ready SL ready physx ready
1:01
all that good NVIDIA stuff this particular one comes Factory overclock
1:05
so in terms of that performance you may find it performs a little bit better
1:09
than a normal GTX 460 SE okay mind you
1:14
you could do that overclocking yourself it has a three-year warranty in the US
1:17
and Canada it comes with their wind Force air anti- turbulence cooling
1:21
cooler which we're going to have a look at once we get this opened up as well as
1:25
Ultra durable VGA which has all of these
1:28
things going for it
1:31
Ultra durable is a bit of a carryover from gigabytes motherboard technology so
1:36
here we see it has one gig of gddr5 2 56
1:40
bit memory interface that other stuff we already
1:44
pretty much talked about and what else do we have here oh okay they're going to
1:48
give us some more explanation of the anti- turbulence cooling wind Force so
1:52
2x anti- turbulence inclined fins okay the latest cooling Gigabyte
1:57
understands the fan is crucial to the graphics cards so only the fan with the
2:00
most efficiency select for windforce ultra quiet pwm fans anti- turbulence
2:06
inclined fins okay pure copper heat
2:11
pipes okay so they're saying it's h silent
2:15
and helps Heats can spread effectively
2:18
from hot areas all right let's get this card opened up and have a look I'm tired
2:22
of looking at the box I think I'm zoomed in right now there we
2:28
go all right GTX 460
2:33
SE the first thing we will find inside
2:36
is a user manual and multilingual
2:40
installation guide as well as a driver disc throw the driver disc away keep the
2:45
installation guide just in case you need it next we have two Molex so dual Molex
2:52
two single six pin PCIe adapters
2:55
although I'll go with my usual recommendation that if you're buying a
2:58
graphics card that requires 2 PCI E6 pins you should probably have a power
3:02
supply that already has them we have a mini HDMI two HDMI adapter so I guess uh
3:08
we can assume that the card is going to have mini HDMI we also have a DVI to VGA
3:12
adapter if you are still using a VGA monitor it looks like the packaging has
3:16
been uh repurposed a little bit from a longer graphics card since you can see
3:20
there's quite a bit of space at the end of the
3:24
460s okay just a regular piece of tape holding the anti-static bag on there we
3:30
are open that
3:34
up okay so we find a characteristic
3:37
although I don't know how much longer I'm going to be able to say that because
3:41
some of their new motherboards feature matte black pcbs I can't really talk
3:44
about those yet but they look so nice
3:48
anyway we see a characteristic blue Gigabyte PCB uh on the other side
3:54
actually well here let's flip it around this way first so we've got those two six pin PCIe connectors for power here's
4:00
the inclined th uh what's it called wind
4:04
Force yes wind Force cooler which
4:07
actually looks pretty sweet it's got like a nice shiny uh Darth Vader esque
4:12
sort of black going on here very very glossy I really like it and then we've
4:17
got a couple of what appear to be 60 mm
4:21
oh those could even no I think those are 80 mm fans you know what funny Gigabyte
4:26
actually doesn't specify on the outside of their
4:31
box that's a very strange thing you'd think they would You' think they'd
4:35
mention something like that but yeah those look like 80 mm fans and then we
4:39
have two nice big heat pipes going from
4:42
the actual GPU core which hopefully you can see down there out to the very ends
4:47
of the wind Force ex now what they mean by anti- turbulence I'm just going to
4:52
try to figure out a little bit I think what they mean is the way that the fins
4:56
are inclined they're not actually quite flat so they're inclined this way and
5:01
then you can see the fans compared to the card I hope you can see that are
5:04
actually inclined a little bit too so I think the idea is that it's uh rather
5:09
than the air like kind of slamming into a surface right away it's more like a
5:14
gradual approach to it and it lets it kind of cut through it uh rather than
5:19
just uh creating more noise and more well there
5:23
turbulence that's my theory anyway I could be wrong it's happened before all
5:27
right so here we are on the top of the card where we find an SLI finger i' I
5:31
see so many people commenting on my channel well what if you run GTX 460 in
5:35
three-way SLI well you can't because there's only a single SLI figure that a
5:39
finger that goes for uh ATI cards or AMD
5:42
cards as well if there's only a single connector you can only run two-way
5:46
multi-GPU configurations if you have two of those connectors you can run three or
5:50
even four-way and that's driver dependent but yeah if there's only one
5:54
you can only run two way so here we have our mini
5:57
HDMI which they haven't included adapter for then we have two DVI
6:03
ports we also have a vented whoa drop
6:07
the card uh vented PCI back plates so you're not going to get a whole lot of
6:11
exhaust out of there based on the design of this cooler so you can see there's
6:16
air is going to come out this way and it's going to kind of hit that it's not
6:20
really going to go out there so I would consider this to be a largely internal
6:25
exhaust cooling design although you will get a little bit of incidental air flow
6:29
coming out the case you're going to be spitting most of the hot air back into your case it's not a big deal it is a
6:34
nice efficient cooler and as long as you have good case fans and a well
6:37
ventilated uh computer you're not going to be running into too many problems PCI
6:42
e6x standard slot I don't know if I mention that yet but I think that pretty
6:47
much covers it so the GTX 460 SE like I mentioned is a 1 gig card but it is
6:53
slightly cut down from the actual regular 1 gig card putting it in the
6:58
performance range of a 768 megga card so
7:01
why would you want this well I guess the answer is if you're running at high
7:05
resolution okay and you don't want to buy the the fully-fledged one gig card
7:09
or if you're running kind of like older games that don't require quite as fast
7:13
GPU but you want to run like uh third party texture pack stuff like that you
7:17
need the extra video memory this is the card for you so don't forget to
7:20
subscribe to lineus techtips for more unboxings reviews and other computer
7:24
videos