14 DAY TRIAL // Though NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 480 and 470 may have left something to be desired in the areas of power consumption and heat generation, the GTX 460 appears to be unaffected by these downsides. This allowed it to become quite popular after getting positive reviews, and prompted NVIDIA's partners to create a significant number of custom-clocked and cooled versions. Now, Zotac seems to be working on a slightly more ambitious project, namely a GTX 460 with 2GB of GDDR5 VRAM.
Zotac isn't exactly the first to think about such a move. In fact, Gainward, which is owned by Palit, has already previewed the GTX 460 2GB Golden Sample. Said video board has the same amount of memory (2GB) and higher clock speeds. On Zotac's offer, not everything is known, but Expreview did manage to get a hold of part of the specifications.
The 2GB GTX 460 has 336 CUDA cores and its large amount of VRAM benefits from an Interface of 256 bits. Unfortunately, the frequency of the GF104 GPU is not known at this time, nor is the clock of the memory itself. On the other hand, the dual-fan Accelero Twin Turbo Pro dual-slot solution from Arctic Cooler promises to drive temperatures lower than they would otherwise be. The cooling module has four copper heatpipes and its two fans measure 92 mm in diameter. Finally, the board communicates with monitors and other displays via dual-DVI, HDMI and DisplayPort outputs.
DirectX 11 support need not even be mentioned and, naturally, the product has full compatibility with NVIDIA's various proprietary technologies, such as multi-GPU SLI and CUDA, among other things. Unfortunately, there is nothing known, so far, on the price that this model will carry, nor is its launch date made clear. In the other hand, this information should surface in the near future, so customers won't have to wait overly long for Palit to get some head-on competition.