EVGA GTX 460 2WIN Unboxing & First Look Linus Tech Tips
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2012-05-07
·
1,241 words · ~6 min read
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today we will be doing an unboxing of the GeForce GTX 460 to win or twin from
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EVGA this is something I've received numerous requests to take a look at and
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to evaluate the performance of so I'm going to be doing one of those things
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today and I will be taking a look at it
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I will not be evaluating the performance because I can tell you guys right now
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before I've even opened the box how it will perform and I think the performance
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should be fairly evident based on the name of the product in this case so what
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this is is it is a custom PCB product from EVGA who is if you are to believe
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what it says on the side of their box and I do the number one seller in the US
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of NVIDIA based products number one in reliability and service of graphics
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cards something something footnote number one performance leader in 3D Mark
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11 and the number one full at home team in the
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world let's open this baby
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up and see what we get in terms of
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accessories so the first thing we have is a graphics card user guide the next
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thing we find is a driver CD with a
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sticker so you can use the sticker but throw away the driver CD download the
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latest drivers from NVIDIA.com this is a
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sticker it appears to be a bumper sticker that's kind of sweet throw that
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in your car why not right all right next we we
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have a mini HDMI to HDMI cable and
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that's a nice long cable so you don't have to worry about any clearance issues
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when you're plugging in the fulls size HDMI cable we've got two uh dual six pin
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to single 8 Pin PCIe power connectors as well as a DVI to VGA adapter the next
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thing we find is the two win or twin
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card itself which has a custom cooler
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custom PCB this is just about as custom
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a card as you can hope to encounter so
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let's uh open this up and let's talk about
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performance here for a little bit so performance of the GeForce GTX 460 twin
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well the performance will be exactly the
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performance of two GTX 460s in SLI or
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with pretty much within margin of error of such a solution because this is a
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dual GPU graphics card so on this fully
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custom PCB you can see we have three 80
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mm fans and those are all blowing into a
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fully custom heat pipe cooler so you can see each of the gpus has three heat
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pipes so on this top one you can see three heat pipes coming out this way
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this way and this way this middle one is actually only cooling heat well only
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carrying away heat that is brought to it from the heat pipes from the other gpus
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as well as blowing down onto the PCB to cool any other incidental components and
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then here the other GPU has three heat pipes coming out of it this way so
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carrying heat away from those GTX 460 gpus or GF 110s I believe they are all
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right so this is not restrictive at all
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so these fans are going to have full access to the airf flow that they need
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to blow air onto the heat pipes and fins
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here this is a really cool thing about this card because it is an SLI on a card
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card we actually have full support for
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three dis plays out in 3D Vision surround so one of these sets of
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displays is running off one of the cards the other two displays are running off
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of the other card or chip or whatever you want to call it so we have full
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support for technology that is typically
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only possible with NVIDIA SLI so here we
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see a little bit of the overall design of the card so you can see where the
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gpus are situated you can see this is 512 Megs of RAM so the other 512 Megs is
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likelihood I'm just going to double check that before I go ahead and confirm
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it yep is on the other side of the PCB
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here is all of our power delivery circuitry which is uh incidentally
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powered by the two 8 Pin PCIe connectors on the top of the card here's where the
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other GPU is as well as the RAM around it and the rest of the RAM is on the
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other side you can see here that we are
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using a PCIe 16x interface to
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communicate with the computer and up here we've have actually got an SLI
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Bridge finger this doesn't work because
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the of the limitations of the GF 110 GPU
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itself it is not capable of four-way SLI
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it is only capable of two-way SLI which we are already running because we're
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running SLI on a card so we can't use this that is just a an error shouldn't
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be there okay here we've got two uh
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eight pin PCIe power connectors which I mentioned before they are situated in
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their ideal locations on the top of the board because if if you extended this
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board any longer then it might not fit into some cases we've got an EVGA logo
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up here at the top which matches the color scheme of the rest of the card
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which looks really sharp I might add and
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then other than that uh let's move around to the back of the card and have
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a look at what's there not a whole lot okay let's look at the bottom of the
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card not a whole lot nice brushed finish to the cooler though looks really really
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sharp and I just want to do a quick size comparison for you guys I'm just going
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to run and grab a GT X let's see let's get a let's get an
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EVGA GTX 580 and uh that's all I really
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have on me right now I think oh no hold on I have uh here I have a radon
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6990 so why don't we compare the size
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really quickly to these other cards so remember the GTX 460 because it's such a
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good value GPU as soon as you put it in SLI it
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actually outperforms a GTX 580 even
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though the twin is a less expensive solution than a GTX 580 power
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consumption is also excellent on the GTX
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uh 460 so that is that's what makes this
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card such a compelling solution and that's why EVGA went out of their way to
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produce a custom card just for gtx460
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SLI so here is the length compared to the radon 6990 you can see it is a touch
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shorter about a half about a centimeter and a bit shorter and requires the same
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number of PCIe 8 Pin connectors although
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I can guarantee you this dual GTX 460
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card consumes far less power than the 6990 thank you for checking out my
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unboxing of the EVGA GeForce GTX 460
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twin don't forget to subscribe to line This Tech tips from unboxings reviews
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