Gadgetory

hey guys great new tech bite here for you today we have the fresh off the line GTX 460 video card which is sort of the evolution of the 480 and 470 cards that we saw released earlier this year the 460 is a mid-range card priced at only $199 with an entirely new core that should solve the problem of the high heat and high power consumption we saw with the earlier cards so let's take a look at the technical specs and see what's new just a quick side-by-side comparison here against the other 400 series cards what you'll see is the GTX 460 is actually one of the faster cards when it comes to clock speeds you have the graphics processor and memory speeds just under that of the GTX 480 however where it balances that out is with the 336 processor cores and only a 256 bit or 192 bit memory bus it's also made a few sacrifices in other areas of the card the other thing to the especial note of is the TDP not to be confused with actual power consumption but the 460 is only pushing up to 160 watts which means this is going to run a lot cooler and take a lot less power all right on to the ever-popular unboxing as you can see we have the EVGA model of the card one thing I should mention this isn't 768 megabyte version there is a second 1 gigabyte model which offers a 256-bit memory bus about it easy little mortals stencil so opening it up we have our EVGA 400 GPUs sticker we have the driver CD as well as the user manual installation guide that fun stuff this is kind of cool EBG is getting away from the plastic clamshell packaging and usually recyclable recyclable paper products which is kind of nice of them we have the HDMI adapter we have a sorry a DVI to VGA adapter the molex into PCI Express the power adapters and that is it we have the card itself little packaging here this is kind of interesting it's definitely a lot shorter and the cooler is a lot less lot less ominous than the GTX 480 with the heat pipes of the side it is quite a bit shorter actually what we have with the with the fan here a little bit of a larger fan and there's actually sort of a dip in the cooler if you can see it there into the fan so maybe that's for noise to reduce the noise we have the we have the dual power plugs on the back there's not much else exciting about it we have the dual DVI on the outputs as well as mini HDMI and the exhaust point and we have just the single sli bridge that's about it let's fire it up and we'll take a look at the benchmarks start off our temperature testing here's our baseline sitting about 30 to 33 degrees at idle room temperatures sitting about 24 degrees Celsius or with at 75 degrees Fahrenheit so what we're going to do is run it for just over an hour through 3dmark Vantage there looping only the GPU tests are going to see just how hot this thing is going to get all right so I've been looping the 3dmark Vantage here for the past hour or so and we're looking at a maximum GPU temperature of just about 62 to 63 degrees alright so for our very quick and entirely subjective noise test we have the camera a little less than a foot away from the video card it's at 40% which is the idle percentage it actually didn't once go over 40% at any time during the testing so here you go we'll present a little bit of a worst case scenario where we bump it up to 50% here and if it's extremely warm then we'll bump it up to 60% here so when you hit 60 it's sort of overtakes the noise of your CPU cooler fan but it's nothing like the mini jet engines that we hear with the higher end Nvidia and ATI cards so very good on that front and so there we have it the quick and dirty on the GTX 460 video card you can head over to triple WR XCOM and get the full smorgasbord of benchmarks but as far as this review goes the GTX 460 looks like a pretty kick-ass little card which you get for under $200 is DirectX 11 support all the extras 3d vision cuda process and image quality improvements any card that completely destroys its closest competition in games all I can say is that unless ATI manages to pull something out of their hat in the next few months this is probably going to be the best gaming graphics card that we see in this price category all year thanks for checking out hardware connects tech bytes guys and we'll see you next time