14 DAY TRIAL // Though unveiled quite some time ago, NVIDIA's popular GeForce GTX 460 video board has again been customized, by Sparkle this time, by means of a large, dual-fan cooler and factory-boosted frequencies.
As consumer may be aware, the GeForce GTX 460 is aimed at the upper level of the mainstream market, the so-called performance segment.
Sparkle decided it would make the product even more imposing by modifying its clock speeds and giving it a large cooler that makes the whole product take up three PCI Express slots.
The cooler in question is known as the Arctic Accelero Twin Turbo and is a combination of four copper heatpipes, a heatsink and a pair of 92mm fans.
The extra cooling prowess copes with the added heat generation of the higher clock speeds, though the sheer size of the module has the side-effect of making SLI configurations more or less tricky on any motherboard smaller than the ATX form factor.
As for the actual specifications, the board has an all-black PCB, comes with 336 CUDA cores, features 1 GB of GDDR5 VRAM and a memory interface of 256 bits.
The clock speeds are of 790 MHz for the 40nm-based GF104 GPU (graphics processing unit), 1,580 MHz for the shaders and 3,900 MHz for the memory.
Basically, the video controller should be both stronger and cooler than the reference versions, even if it does take up three slots.
Of course, the entire collection of NVIDIA technologies, such as CUDA, PhysX, 2-way SLI and 3D Vision Surround, are supported.
Those that seek a first-hand view of the specifications and any other information on the newcomer need only visit Sparkle's official website.
As for pricing and availability, the official announcement failed to provide any sort of information, which means that users have to settle for waiting until online stores begin listing it.