MSI NVIDIA GeForce GTX 460 Cyclone OC 1GB Video Card Unboxing & First Look Linus Tech Tips
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2011-05-08
·
1,295 words · ~6 min read
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This is a video card that's been highly anticipated and has received fantastic
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reviews across the web. This is the GeForce GTX 460. And this particular
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version is not your run-of-the-mill GTX 460. Now, I've received a lot of
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requests over the uh time that I've been doing my unboxings and blog videos to
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take a look at cards that don't feature the reference NVIDIA or ATI design.
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Well, I'm finally doing it. This is another non-reference card. I looked at
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another one recently. So, this features MSI's cyclone cooler. It also has their
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military grade, sorry, military class components. So, you can see here that
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includes the high conductive capacitors, solid capacitors, solid state chokes, as
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well as no buzz. And this is a really interesting thing for them to call out
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because I've seen a lot of complaints over the last few years with many
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high-end cards that as soon as you start to play a game, you hear like a whine or
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a buzz. And that's from this style of choke. With a solid state choke, a
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well-built one, and a well-designed PCB, you can eliminate that noise so that if
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you have a quiet fan, you hear zero
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noise from your graphics card. So, that's something I'm definitely going to take a look at when I actually get this
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video card out of the box and running. They are also talking about MSI
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Afterburner, which is a terrific utility co-developed by MSI and Revet Tuner.
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It's my overclocking utility of choice. You've probably actually seen me use it
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in a couple of videos, even featuring other brands of graphics cards because
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it works great. And then let's have a look at what else we've got.
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Uh oh, okay. Cameraman wants to look at
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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
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card out of the box and then I can talk about some of the other bullet points that make this particular one special.
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MSI does include a three-year warranty with their graphics cards. And
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so, wow, my box fell apart. Look at that. Hopefully they have a warranty on
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the box, too. Haha. Wow. I like I unboxed it like more than usual. Huh.
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Okay. Well, there you can see the box and it's all all of its glory. Just like
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that. Okay. So, let's get the card open
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here. In terms of accessories, we've got pretty standard fair. We have a DVI to
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VGA adapter, a DVI to HDMI adapter.
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We've got uh two Molex to six pin PCI
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Express power adapters. And then we have a graphics card. Now, this is an odd
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one. Oh, no. There it is. I was going to say there's no driver disc. I don't have
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to tell you not to use it and to throw it away, but there it is. Throw it away.
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And then we've got a quick users guide.
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So, that's going to show you how to install your graphics card, tell you a
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little bit about it, show you how to install the drivers. Okay. And then the
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last thing we have here is something about the 460 GTX series.
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So installing MSI live update. Oh, okay. So this is their automatic driver update
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feature. MSI live update. So they're just giving you some instructions on how
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to use that. Let's take it
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out of the anti-static wrap
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here and have a look at this very highly anticipated card. So
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here we have it. This is the MSI GTX
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460. This is a 1 gig over factory overclocked card featuring their Cyclone
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cooler. So, the Cyclone cooler, here's an interesting that I noticed about it,
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and I actually talked about this in my other GTX 460 unboxing is you see the
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shape of this cooler. I called out that it looks a lot like a stock Intel
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reference cooler. And what I didn't realize is that why NVIDIA is probably
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using this in their reference design cards is because MSI has been using this
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exact Cyclone heat sink for a couple generations now and it does a really
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good job. Now, the difference between the Cyclone and the stock cooler is a
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the Cyclone doesn't have a shroud, so you actually get slightly better
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performance that way because everything's exposed to the open air in your case. And the second thing is that
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it actually has a couple of heat pipes in addition to the uh to the fins on the
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bottom that carry up to a couple more fin banks that are going to benefit from
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some of the incidental air flow from this fan. So, it's going to blow down,
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but it's also going to have a lot of air going out this way, and that's going to
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take away a lot of the heat that these heat pipes carry out to the fins on the
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sides there. Cameraman is having a nice look
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at the cooler. I mean, the Cyclone cooler is really uh one of the big
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talking points about this card because and I'm going to do some testing on it,
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but MSI's claims are that it is up to
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15.7% quieter under load and also that
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it will cool much better at that same uh
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quieter level. That was really awkward. Okay, it cools better and it's quieter
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there. That's easy. It has a 90 mm fan,
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so a 9 cm PWM controlled fan. So that
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means that even at very low speeds, it will manage to start itself up, which is
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the problem with nonPWM fans. It
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has Yeah, I think that's pretty much everything else I wanted to say about
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it. Okay, let's have a look at the card itself. This has a PCI Express 16x
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interface. It is SLI ready, so you can
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use up to two GeForce GTX 460 cards in
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SLI. And let's see what we've got for
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output options. We have two DVI ports.
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and one mini HDMI port on the back of the card. So, that means that you do
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have support for up to three monitors in SLI mode. It does support 3D vision
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surround. Okay. And then, okay, I'm just
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going to take that right off. In terms of power requirements, it's not nearly
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as power hungry as many of the other Fermy series cards, but it still does
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require two PCI Express six pin connectors on the back. So, if you're
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going to run SLI, make sure that you've got four of these babies. And I think
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that pretty much covers everything I wanted to say. This is the Cyclone
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cooled version of the Okay, I don't know what cameraman's looking at. He wants to
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see the back of the card. Okay, cameraman's looking at the back of the
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card. I hope you're enjoying this. That's where the GPU is. Uh, you can deduce
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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
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that there's a bunch of components on the back of the PCB and also that that
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is where the cooler is positioned on the front of the card. Thank you for
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checking out my unboxing of the MSI N460
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GTX Cyclone 1 gig OC video card.