The GTX 460 has gotten great reviews since it has been released a couple of days ago, as the card perfoms great, runs quiet and packs impressive overclocking potential. Nvidia aimed the GTX 460, or rather two different GTX 460 cards (768MB and 1024MB GDDR5 versions) at mid-range, sub-€200 gaming market. For high end enthusiasts, Nvidia has the GTX 480, but two GTX 460 768MB cards in SLI mode can be even better – all this for a price of a single GTX 480.
The results we’re about to show you paint a nice picture on the performance of the upcoming dual-GPU (GF104) card. It will be great if the new dual-GPU card comes with two GF104 chips with 384 stream processors each, higher clocks and 256-bit memory interface because such a scenario would probably make the HD 5970 shake in its boots.
What we can see today is that GTX 480 pricing has dropped by more than €30 in the last few days, so the GTX 480 is now available at about €400. So, we’re about to see the reason of such high price-drops.
Seting up 2-Way SLI with two GTX 460 768MB cards
In order to put both cards to use, it’s not only placing them in the motherboard and connecting them with the SLI connector – you’ll have to turn on SLI within the driver, in the “Set SLI and PhysX Configuration” menu. You have to choose Maximize 3D Performance option, after which both GPUs will join forces and should in theory double your graphics performance. Note that this action does not require a restart.
GTX 460 cards allow only for 2-way SLI, as the cards comes with only on SLI connector.
Naturally, 3-way SLI capable card would need two SLI connectors, which is the case with the GTX 480 on the picture below.