14 DAY TRIAL // With AMD's HD 6000 series on the loose, NVIDIA's partners decided to raise the stakes by improving the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 460, and MSI just recently finished the N460GTX-SE.
For those interested in a reminder, the GeForce GTX 460 was the first so-called mainstream graphics card based on the Fermi architecture that NVIDIA released.
More recently, however, Advanced Micro Devices created the Radeon HD 6870 and 6850, which more or less battle NVIDIA's board on the higher level of the mainstream (the performance segment).
Wishing to ensure that its presence on the graphics front remains strong, MSI redesigned the GTX 460 again, this time with a Cyclone cooler.
Like all other GTX 460 models, it runs on the GF104 graphics processing unit, while its amount of GDDR5 VRAM can be of 768 MB or 1 GB.
Additionally, depending on the amount of memory, the interface is of 192 bits or 256 bits.
Unfortunately, the company's press release did not offer any sort of performance number, meaning that clocks are still under wraps.
On the other hand, MSI did mention that the N460GTX-SE, as it is called, will have up to 30% overclocking potential, hence the aforementioned percentage.
In fact, enthusiasts will be able to easily tweak the performance thanks to the MSI Afterburner software.
Other specifications include 336 CUDA cores, support for NVIDIA 3D Vision, PhysX, SLI, CUDA and, las but not least, Military Class components, which boost stability and endurance.
Finally, cooling is ensured by the aforementioned Cyclone. It uses a nickel-plated copper base and dual heat pipes to draw heat away form the GPU, after which said heat is dispersed by a 90mm PWM fan.
The exact announcement can be found here, but consumers will have to wait a while before any pricing and availability details are provided, as they were kept as hidden as the clock frequencies themselves.