14 DAY TRIAL // There have been many rumors surrounding the upcoming GF104 GPU and the cards it will spawn. It can, in fact, be said that this new processor is seen, by certain parties, as the part that will finally propel sales of NVIDIA cards. The GF100 did, of course, manage to reclaim the performance crown, but it is still quite power hungry and its high operational temperature makes its placing inside a system, especially in multi-GPU setups, a little difficult. However, what really sounds promising about the GF104 is that, unlike the GF100, it will actually have a high overclocking headroom.
Needless to say, enthusiasts are waiting with baited breaths for a DirectX 11 chip that may, at last, let them score benchmarking records and compete against AMD's solutions. Unfortunately, this speculation, so far, was only possible because of a series of rumors that sprouted over the past few weeks. As far as actual sightings are concerned, not much has appeared. Until now, at least.
Expreview appears to have somehow stumbled across actual press shots of the GeForce GTX 460. The view is not what one may expect. For one, the video controller is much shorter than all the GTX 400 Series members so far unleashed. The model still takes up two PCI slots though, and has an active cooler with a single fan. As for specifications, there are 336 CUDA cores clocked at 1350MHz, the GPU clocked at 675MHz, 768MB/1GB of GDDR5 operating at 3600MHz and an interface of 192bits/256 bits. The entire creature is fueled through two 6-pin PCI Express power connectors.
The GeForce GTX 460 supports 2-way SLI configurations and communicates with video output devices through dual DVI and HDMI outputs. It is unknown when exactly the launch is supposed to take place, but it should be sometime during the next month. NVIDIA's partners will likely be eager to follow up with their own models as well.