14 DAY TRIAL // NVIDIA launched the GeForce GTX 460 video card some time ago and was finally able to address part of the mainstream market. The card was even well received by reviewers, not just because of its might but due to no longer having the high temperature that GF100-enabled cards have come to be known for. Also, quite a number of NVIDIA's partners overclocked their own models, enabling an even higher performance. Gainward seems to want to go even higher than that, however, and decided that just tweaking the clocks wasn't enough.
Gainward outfitted its latest GTX 460 with not just one, but two full gigabytes of GDDR5 VRAM, and gave it the fairly straightforward name of GTX 460 2GB Golden Sample. Like the stock model, it is based on the GF104 graphics processing unit which is built on the 40nm manufacturing process technology. However, it is factory overclocked to 700 MHz (stock version if 675 MHz). Furthermore, the board boasts 336 CUDA cores and a VRAM clock of 3,600 MHz and a memory interface of 256 bits. D-Sub, dual-DVI and HDMI outputs, are present. As for the shaders themselves, they work at 1,400 MHz.
Needless to say, Gainward made sure its invention fully supported all the technologies that a GTX 400 card should support. In addition to the obvious DirectX 11 graphics, the card features PhysX and CUDA, as well as the 3D Vision Surround technology, which allows two or more video boards in SLI to play games and videos in 3D on three displays at once. As for how the card can stay alive even under full load, the Palit-owned hardware maker implemented a dual-slot cooler with a pair of 6mm copper heatpipes and two 80mm fans.
Predictably, the Gainward GTX 460 2GB Golden Sample has a custom PCB, otherwise it would not have been possible to add so much memory and the special cooling device. Unfortunately, the company chose not to mention any pricing details, but it can be assumed that the final tag will be of over 210 Euro.