When a new product is released, companies understandably want to make a pretty big fuss about it. Or at least, that’s what usually happens. Last week NVIDIA decided to very quietly launch a card called the GTX 460 SE and many didn’t find out that it was a bona-fide product until it popped up on board partners’ websites.
Why all the mummery up until launch? To begin with, the GTX 460 SE is what’s called a “virtual product” in certain distributor circles. This means there is no reference version per se and NVIDIA’s AIBs can design the card around a loosely defined set of specifications. Of course there are minimum clock speeds that need to be adhered to but all in all, companies like EVGA, Gigabyte, ASUS and others have been given free rein to design their cards as they see fit. Think of the GTX 460 SE launch as NVIDIA’s version of the HD 5830 but with a lot less pomp surrounding its introduction. Indeed, some companies may not even be launching an "SE" edition for the time being.
The raison d’être of the GTX 460 SE 1GB is a bit of a mystery since it is priced similarly to the GTX 460 768MB but its specifications are cut down by comparison. NVIDIA has claimed the target market for the $159 SE will be those who want higher image quality than what a 768MB framebuffer can provide but don’t want to step up to the price of a $200 GTX 460 1GB. In addition, we hear that quite a few board partners may be using this card as a Black Friday promotional item so there may be some excellent prices for it within the next few days.
In order to get information to you as quickly as possible, we had Gigabyte rush-ship us one of their GTX 460 SE OC cards. It makes use of a core speed overclock to provide additional performance at a price that is within a few dollars of a stock-clocked product. To see how a standard GTX 460 SE performs, we flashed the BIOS of the Gigabyte card with one which has the reference clocks.
While this launch may have been one of the quietest in a long, long time it should be interesting to see how the new GTX 460 performs. On paper at least, it has the potential to continue the tradition of NVIDIA’s most popular Fermi products.
Core Temperature & Acoustics
For all temperature testing, the cards were placed on an open test bench with a single 120mm 1200RPM fan placed ~8” away from the heatsink. The ambient temperature was kept at a constant 22°C (+/- 0.5°C). If the ambient temperatures rose above 23°C at any time throughout the test, all benchmarking was stopped. For this test we use the 3DMark Batch Size test at it highest triangle count with 4xAA and 16xAF enabled and looped it for one hour to determine the peak load temperature as measured by GPU-Z.
For Idle tests, we let the system idle at the Windows 7 desktop for 15 minutes and recorded the peak temperature.
With Gigabyte’s custom dual fan heatsink, temperatures are kept well in check while the acoustics are kept lower than most other cards on the market. In short, this card is astonishingly quiet.
System Power Consumption
For this test we hooked up our power supply to a UPM power meter that will log the power consumption of the whole system twice every second. In order to stress the GPU as much as possible we once again use the Batch Render test in 3DMark06 and let it run for 30 minutes to determine the peak power consumption while letting the card sit at a stable Windows desktop for 30 minutes to determine the peak idle power consumption. We have also included several other tests as well.
Please note that after extensive testing, we have found that simply plugging in a power meter to a wall outlet or UPS will NOT give you accurate power consumption numbers due to slight changes in the input voltage. Thus we use a Tripp-Lite 1800W line conditioner between the 120V outlet and the power meter.
The elimination of an SM along with its associated CUDA cores and TMUs naturally leads to lower power consumption which can only be counted as a positive thing for this architecture.
from : hardwarecanucks.com
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