Gigabyte Intros Revamped GeForce GTX 460

For the time being, things seem to have sort of cooled down in the GPU battle arena, after the release of the GTX 500 Series from NVIDIA and Radeon HD 6900 Series from AMD, most of the more recent launches being either overclocked or simply revamped versions of older cards, as is the case with the latest product from Gigabyte, namely the GV-N460OC-1GI (rev. 2.0).

As you might have guessed by taking a quick look at the name, what we're talking about here is the second revision of Gigabyte's GTX 460, now featuring a longer PCB, and a tweaked WindForce 2X cooler.

According to Gigabyte, the special inclined dual fan design effectively minimizes the flow of turbulence between two fans and enhances heat dissipation of hot areas right underneath each fan.

With this special design, WindForce 2X even enlarges air channel on the graphics card vents and creates a more effective air flow system in chassis, while also helping heat dissipate quickly from the GPU.

In addition, the revised graphics card is apparently equipped with 3 copper heat-pipes which strengthen the speed of heat dissipation, compared to just two in the case of the previous model.

Apart from these slight modifications, the dual-slot GV-N460OC-1GI rev. 2.0 offers roughly the same features as rev 1.0, including a 715 MHz core clock, 1430 MHz shader clock, 3600 MHz memory clock and GDDR5 memory.

Additional features worth mentioning include a a 256-bit memory interface, 2-way SLI support and dual-DVI and HDMI outputs.

According to TCMagazine, the GV-N460OC-1GI rev. 2.0 should be priced similarly to the first revision, namely around 157 Euro or so, which is not that bad (but we're still waiting for some price drops in the future, once the GTX 560 is outed, most likely at some point in Q1, 2011).