EVGA NVIDIA GeForce GTX 460 Fermi 768MB Gaming Video Card Unboxing & First Look Linus Tech Tips
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2011-05-08
·
1,068 words · ~5 min read
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Today we're going to be unboxing a very exciting product from EVGA. This is the
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GeForce GTX 460. So that is 20 less than
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the GTX 480, 10 less than the GTX 470,
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and only five less than the GTX 465. But
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the performance of the 460 is actually
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very, very close to its big brother, the 465. And it's quite a lot cheaper. Now,
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it does have less RAM, so that means at
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high resolutions, you might be a little bit limited in terms of running like
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huge anti-aliasing on high resolutions, but with the price of this card, you're
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probably not going to be running at 2560 x600 with a 30-in monitor anyway. So,
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I'm going to go ahead and start breaking the seals here. So the GTX 465 or 460 is
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a bit of a change from the other Firmeny based cards in that NVIDIA has actually
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reworked the architecture of this card quite a bit. That means that power
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consumption is down, heat output is down
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and performance is up versus some of the other 400 series cards. It also means
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that the price is down. So, this is around $200 US, and that puts it
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securely in a sort of uh value
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enthusiast gamer price point if such a thing existed. So, here's a little quick
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start guide. Next, we have a graphics card user guide. Okay, so that shows us
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some super basics. Talks about EVJ's
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advanced RMA program. Talks a little bit about their precision software, which is
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for overclocking. That's a pretty good value ad as well as EVGA social
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networks. Okay, cool. Let's go ahead and put that down.
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We've got an EVGA sticker as well as an EVGA driver disc. Don't use this driver
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disc. Download the latest off the NVIDIA website. Ooh, that's a nice sticker.
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EVGA GeForce GTX 400 GPUs. So, I could
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put it there if I wanted to, but I don't. Next, let's go and have a look at
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the card itself. So, I haven't seen an EVGA box like this before. It looks like
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they've redesigned things a little bit. In terms of accessories, we've got a
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mini HDMI to HDMI dongle. We have a dual
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Molex to one PCIe 6 pin dongle. Then we
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have two Molex to one PCIe 6. Okay, so we have two of those. Then we have a DVI
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to VGA adapter. And that's it. Then we
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have the card itself. It's quite a bit smaller than the G other GTX 400 series
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cards because all of the other cards despite having different model names are
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based on the same core and most of them are even based on the same PCB even if
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the coolers are slightly different. This one however is based on a much smaller
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PCB. So it ends up being a much smaller card and it's also a smaller core. So
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you can see where the uh where the GPU core actually is on the back of the GPU.
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Back of the video card. See GPU and video card. I use these terms interchangeably, but the GPU is actually
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the graphics processing unit there. And
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the video card is the whole thing with a PCB, which in this case is black, a GPU
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on it, RAM on it, all that good stuff. So at the top, we're going to find an
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SLI connector. It is SLI ready, but it does not support 3-way SLI because for
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three-way SLI, you would need two SLI connectors. We have an 80 mm fan on the
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front, and you can see that it's using a flower style heatsink that is actually
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uh here, cameraman, just look at that card for a second. I'll be back. It
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actually closely resembles the stock Intel heatsink where you've got a copper
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core at the back. And in this case, we can see there is a copper base with a
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couple of heat pipes attached to it. And then it's got like this uh radial fin
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thing going on. And I've actually seen Intel heat sinks that are shaped exactly
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like that. So it looks like uh you know it's a bit of a tribute to Intel's
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thermal engineers that yes, that design does work. We've got two heat pipes
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coming out here and uh presumably coming
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over here where there's more heat sink and over here and presumably coming out
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over there. So you can actually see yes there is uh additional heat sink
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material past that little uh flower shape and that's having heat transported
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to it by the heat pipe. So here we've got PCI Express 16x connector and at the
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back of the card it still does pull back a fair bit of power but that's what you
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generally expect from a $200 plus gaming card. So you need two six pin PCI
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Express connectors. And let's have a look at what we've got in terms
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of cameraman. What are you doing? Oh,
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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
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here, I'll look through the camera, too. Oh, we can see the heat sink. Okay. Hold
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on. I'm going to look. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You can see where the heat pipe
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attaches to that heat sink in there. Cool. All right. So, let's turn around
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and see what we've got in terms of output connectors. So, we have two DVI
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and one HDMI connector. Now, this card does support NVIDIA surround as well as
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3D vision technology. So, bearing in mind though that you would need two
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cards to run surround gaming. So, you can only use two of these three
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connectors at any given time. Thank you for checking out my unboxing of the EVG8
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GeForce GTX 460 768meg version. Bearing
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in mind there is a 1 gig version that will perform slightly better due to
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extra memory as well as extra memory bandwidth.
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The cameraman pointed out to me this is actually a bumper sticker. So you would
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apply it to your bumper like so.