14 DAY TRIAL // While NVIDIA has been extremely vocal about its latest DirectX 11 monster, the “world's fastest” GeForce GTX 580, the company promoting this GPU's launch in every possible way, things are quite different with its latest mid-range offering, the GTX 460 SE, that's got somewhat of an “under the radar” channel launch.
Although we don't know for sure what the SE stands for (presumably second-edition), the truth of the matter is that this new addition to NVIDIA's lineup is not exactly what we'd call a worthy successor to the GTX 460, but rather a successor that takes this mid-range solution into a fairly different direction.
And that's because, instead of being more powerful than the original, the GTX 460 SE actually packs just 288 CUDA cores and a 256-bit memory bus with 1GB of memory, while the “old” 460 featured 366 cores, combined with an 192-bit memory bus (768MB and 1GB versions were available).
The SE's cores run at 650MHz while the memory is clocked at 1300MHz, which is, once again fairly different from the original version, clocked at 675MHz/1350MHz.
Apparently, NVIDIA's target with this card was the same consumer segment as the one AMD's Radeon HD 5770 goes for, although the latter is quite likely approaching the end of life, soon to be replaced by more advanced versions.
As you've been able to see up until now, the GTX 460 SE has made its way into the lineups of at least two of NVIDIA's traditional partners, namely Zotac and EVGA, it's very likely that it will be adopted by even more integrators.
All in all, it seems that NVIDIA had decided that beefing up its midrange lineup is a pretty good sales tactic right now, right before the Christmas shopping spree, when many potential customers are seriously considering an upgrade (by the way, the SE card will be available at the same price point as the old 768MB GTX 460).