Last week one of the leaders in graphic card technology, NVidia, announced the appearance of its GeForce GTX 460 series. The card is available in 768 MB and 1 GB range and combines the best of performance and cost. The GTX 460 is also a combination of Fermi chips and latest NVidia technology. It will also be capable of supporting DirectX 11 and PhysX, in order to be able to handle the newest game titles just as well as movies or photos.

Technical details

Rumors about the production of a GTX 460 series were going around even before the appearance of the GTX 480 model, but now the graphic card is finally unveiled. As one would expect from such class of cards, it incorporates a new GPU, SLI/NVidia 3D vision and 336 CUDA cores to produce incredibly high-end and realistic graphics, as well as great speed, to serve any demanding gamer’s needs.

The card has a PCI express Bus connector with 2.0 interface, as well as two DVI ports and mini-HDMI and HDCP outputs. As we already mentioned, the GTX 460 has two sub models in terms of memory – 768 MB with 192 bit interface and 1 GB with 256-bit interface VRAM. The graphics and processor speeds are 675 MHz and 1350 MHz respectively and the memory clock speed—1800 MHz.

NVidia’s OEM partners

Being one of the leading companies in its field, NVidia has collaborated with many other enterprises to bring even more innovations and affordability to its products, in order to please its faithful customers. Some of these include ASUS, EVGA, Galaxy, Gigabyte, MSI, PNY, Sparkle and others. Each partner also brings its unique flavor to the product.

Asus, for example, have added several useful features. The exclusive DirectCU thermal design uses copper heat pipes, flattened and brought in direct contact with the GPU core. The result is much better transfer of heat and plus twenty percent over the reference cooling. The Voltage Tweak utility allows overclocking and overvolting without the fear of overheating with an eventual result of a fifty percent increase in speed of the card. Endurance features include GPU Guard, EMI Shield and Fuse Protection; all this is Windows 7 optimized.

Another partner, Palit Microsystems, has decided to release its own edition, called “Sonic Platinum” in the service of any hardcore gamer. This version comes out with higher factory set parameters, such as 800 MHz core, GDDR5 1GB high speed and 4 GHz memory. In addition to this, the two ball bearing fan support higher temperatures but are much quieter and render a 17.5% increase in performance.

The first version of NVidia GeForce GTX 400 is available around the world, while a second was expected by the end of July.