A couple of days ago, Nvidia launched GTX 460 cards with a suggested price of €200 for the 768MB model. Gamers who can’t afford more expensive Nvidia DirectX 11 cards will find the GTX 460 to be a great deal, as it’s small, quiet but packs one mean punch. The card is built around the GF104 chip, which is basically a mid-range oriented and further polished Fermi. GF104 has less transistors and runs cooler than its predecessor, but it seems like it offers more performance than the cards with the crippled GF100 chip.

The weather, which in our case is as close to being burned alive as possible, isn’t quite what you’d call perfect for trying out SLI, but we like to torment equipment so we gave it a shot. GTX 460 cards ran great in SLI and we had no overheating. The GPU on EVGA’s GTX 460  768MB Superclocked runs at 763MHz, but temperatures still didn’t exceed 84°C in auto-fan mode. The card in the upper PCI-E slot is slightly hotter, which is expected as the card’s centrally placed fans draws air from around the already hot card below. This results in about 6°C hotter operation for the upper card in idle.

GTX 460 768MB card comes with a 150W TDP. Our test rig equipped with EVGA GTX 460 768MB Superclocked drew up to 299 whereas the scenario with GTX 460 768MB in SLI resulted in consumption of about 490W.





Aliens vs. Predator didn’t manage to double a single card’s results but it came really close – we measured about 90% better results. As you can see from the tables, we tried SLI with two EVGA GTX 460 768MB cards at reference clocks, as well as with Superclocked clocks.



3DMark Vantage reports significant performance boost compared to a single card and it’s even more evident with the higher workload. Performance test saw 65% better results, High test saw 76% whereas Extreme SLI resulted in 81% better performance.  


It will be interesting to compare results with the GTX 480 and HD 5870, so stay tuned as we’ll have the full review soon.