Every year, game lovers try to pick up a new and productive graphics card from an inexpensive segment, while incurring enormous expenses for upgrading a gaming computer. Chasing new chips, players lose sight of the fact that in addition to high frequencies, which are responsible for high performance, an important factor in the operation of a video adapter is its bandwidth and bus discharge for data transfer. Any new product from a cheap segment is inferior in performance to older gaming-grade video cards, which can be purchased on the market at an affordable price. It is a fact! An example is a video adapter based on the Nvidia GeForce GTX 460, the characteristics of which for several years allow you to cope with any existing games on the market. This article is dedicated to this chip.
Construction and appearance
The extremely simplified design of the printed circuit board on all modifications of the GTX 460, without exception, hides the case of the cooling system. To call a perfectly balanced system a fan will not turn anyone's tongue. All manufacturers paid great attention to cooling, because for the GTX 460, performance characteristics come first. And where there is high power, there is no place for overheating. Before buying a game video adapter, the buyer should take care of the space for his installation, because the device during installation takes two mounting brackets and claims to be the third for a full intake of air by the fan from the computer case. The rear panel interfaces are the same for all video cards - two DVI ports and one Mini-HDMI port. Some manufacturers, such as Gainward, are replacing one DVI connector with the old D-SUB interface. Judging by numerous reviews, such a change is welcomed by many owners of older monitors who do not plan additional costs.
Quality assurance
For Nvidia GeForce GTX 460, performance and fault tolerance are in the first place, because it’s not in vain that these chips have a “lifetime warranty” from sellers. No typos! On manufacturers' websites, it is indicated in black and white that when the device is operating in normal modes, this means that without increasing performance by overclocking with special programs, the video card will last a considerable period. If during the operation of the device a factory defect is detected, the seller without any hesitation will replace the adapter with a working version. Going deeper into the warranty, the user can find a number of requirements that are not always maintained during operation. For example, stringent conditions for power supply, in which the list of motherboards, or rather chips, and power supplies recommended for operation is indicated. In any case, the seller makes it clear that the user receives not just another consumer goods, but an elite class video card.
Specifications
This is not to say that the frequency performance of this video adapter is high. The frequencies of the GPU and the shader block are lower than that of video cards of a cheap segment. The fact is that the performance of the entire system as a whole depends on the bandwidth between the key devices, in particular the motherboard, video adapter, memory and processor. Those who do not understand this, and spend money on unproductive components, chasing virtual frequencies. And manufacturers use this, delivering low-quality goods to the market. The GTX 460 specifications focus on data transfer rates. For this, a 256-bit bus and fast DDR5 memory chips are installed - they give performance, but not at all oversized frequencies.
Oddities of Nvidia
Some of Nvidia’s actions are hard to follow. For example, having released the GeForce GTX 460, whose characteristics have great potential, having occupied a niche in the gaming class on the market, the company, instead of creating an inexpensive video adapter with a class lower, made an upgrade by releasing two chips from the printed circuit board. So the GTX 460 video adapter appeared on the market with 768 megabytes on board and with a bit width of 192 bits. Craftsmen orientated very quickly, having bought the necessary chips at a foreign auction and having soldered them in a fee, they saved a considerable amount. Judging by the reviews of many users, neither Nvidia nor the end manufacturer does not prevent such an upgrade. The firmware of the video card without problems perceives the addition of two chips and transfers the device to the elite class. A rather strange and unexpected approach by the manufacturer deserves praise from users.
About suffixes
Trying to somehow saturate the market, Nvidia, on the basis of a single chip, produces products with different technical characteristics, giving them suffixes SE, Ti, GS, LE. Take at least the GTX 460 SE. The characteristics of this video adapter have undergone changes - the number of stream processors has been reduced from 336 to 288 units and slightly reduced the nominal frequencies. As a result, the performance of the video adapter fell by 20%. Yes, the price of the “cropped” device also fell by twenty percent, but judging by the numerous reviews of potential buyers, interest in such an instance quickly disappeared. After all, a video card cannot be restored by a full version by firmware replacement. It’s easier to pay attention to competitors in this price category or, after paying, to purchase a full-fledged video adapter.
Decent chip
The Nvidia GTX 460 chip has the best performance in its class, so almost all computer industry leaders are interested in introducing it on the market. Changing the firmware for themselves, installing a high-quality cooling system and supplying the video adapter with proprietary utilities for managing the device’s characteristics, remarkable devices based on GTX 460 from world famous brands were launched onto the market.
If we talk about the performance of the presented video cards, then there is no significant difference between them. Judging by the numerous reviews of users who performed synthetic tests of their video cards, the performance directly depends on the cooling system and the bus and memory frequencies. Indeed, in order to highlight their product on the market, manufacturers often perform factory overclocking by setting their own nominal frequencies. Naturally, the GTX 460 graphics cards, whose specifications have been changed to a greater extent, do not have a "lifetime warranty."
About manufacturers
Asus, Jetway and Palit are the most powerful video adapters on the market. This is not surprising, because the manufacturer offers products with great factory overclocking. Mighty cooling systems, which the manufacturer paid great attention to, save from overheating. It’s clear that the GeForce GTX 460 graphics card, whose characteristics differ for the better from competitors, will interest potential buyers. Judging by the reviews of the owners, attention is attracted to more devices not subjected to factory overclocking. So, video adapters from Gigabyte, MSI, Zotac, Sparkle and Gainward are popular. The software supplied with them enables the user to independently overclock, if desired. Naturally, the manufacturer states in the warranty obligations that increasing the frequencies by users removes the device from the “lifetime warranty”.
Overclocking efficiency
There are persistent rumors that the GeForce GTX 460 chip, whose characteristics can easily be improved by overclocking, is a lightweight version of the expensive GTX 480 product. On the official website of the company, this fact is denied, but judging by the reviews of many fans who increase the nominal frequencies, the fact is be. The specimen in question does not reach the performance of expensive models based on the GTX 480 , but it can argue with some video cards based on the GTX 470 platform in synthetic tests.
Utilities supplied with video adapters do an excellent job of overclocking, but require additional cooling. Therefore, it is recommended to replace the standard PCB cooling system with something more powerful, for example, from Arctic or DeepCool. The GTX 460 chip, whose characteristics are protected by the system from overheating, in a critical situation resets the frequencies to the factory settings and disables the video driver without stopping the cooling system. For the user, a BSDOS window is displayed with a request to restart the computer, popularly called the "blue window of Windows death."
Huge potential
The GTX 460 graphics card, whose characteristics are directly proportional to the processor power, will survive more than one generation of computer systems. For Pentium 4-based devices, the video adapter will allow you to play resource-intensive games, but you should not expect much potential. In most cases, the processor simply will not have time to process the data. But the systems of the new generation Core i5, i7 and higher will allow the video card to show itself 100%. And if the player will not have enough power GTX 460, no need to think about replacing the video device.
You should buy a similar copy, which has recently been available on the market at a suspiciously low price, and install it in SLI mode, if the motherboard allows. The potential of two powerful graphics cards GTX 460, the characteristics of which have been relevant for several years, at low financial cost, will serve game lovers for more than one year. And it will never allow the user to doubt the correctness of his choice.