14 DAY TRIAL // Since they managed to score some slides about Gigabyte's upcoming GTX 460 offering, the folks over at Expreview seem to have decided it wouldn't hurt to raise the stakes somewhat by also publishing a leak related to a certain other incoming video board. Predictably, the video card in question is also a modified version of NVIDIA's offering, though created by MSI (Micro-Star International). Unlike the former hardware maker, however, the latter took more liberties with its creation, not just in terms of cooling but also when it came to the actual specifications.
The product goes by the name of MSI GTX 460 Cyclone and has 336 CUDA cores, whose frequency is set at 1450 MHz. Additionally, the graphics processing unit, the now infamous GF104, is factory overclocked all the way up to 725MHz. Furthermore, the 768 MB of GDDR5 memory that the adapter is equipped with run at 3600 MHz and have a memory interface of 192 bits.
As the name implies, it is the Cyclone GPU cooler that actually gives this device the appeal. The overall construction is made of aluminum and the GPU base sends the heat drawn out of the GPU away through a pair of 8mm thick heatpipes. These heatpipes are dubbed Super Pipes by MSI and lead the caloric energy into the two arc-shaped fin arrays, also made of aluminum. The two arrays are placed on either side of the single 80mm fan which, in addition to taking care of their heat, cools a spirally-projecting aluminum fin block located underneath it.
As consumers may know, the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 460 will be formally introduced on July 12, which means that MSI's version should debut immediately afterwards. The price is not known for now, but it will obviously be slightly higher than that of the stock model.