GeForce GTX 460 SE review - Introduction

If there is one release from NVIDIA that can be classified as 'a little weird' it just has to be the GeForce GTX 460 SE, out of the blue this product was injected into the retail sales stream, quietly.

Positioned in-between a 768 MB and the 1024MB version of the GTX the 1024MB SE version is now available. So what's the big deal with this product? Ehm, well nothing really, it's a GTX 460 with one shader processor cluster (SM) disabled , yet with some more memory to compensate. Its a good way for NVIDIA to get rid of some GPUs that haven't yielded well. And in the stores, well people tend to pick out 1024MB products faster than say 768MB models, hence this move from NVIDIA.

Armed with an okay price yet still with decent performance you can  now spot that SE edition in the stores, well sort off... as that's problem number two, most AIBs do not sell this product. In fact it took us weeks, literally, to get our hands on a sample, and only after pushing significantly we finally got one from Zotac. EU availability is... let's just say scarce.

So is this product kick-ass in price then? Well... bare with me:

• GeForce GTX 460 768 MB (140 EUR)
• GeForce GTX 460 1024 MB (170 EUR)
• GeForce GTX 460 1024 MB SE (170 EUR)

Nope, in fact it's even a little overpriced considering its performance range. But let's not draw any conclusion just yet, today we'll test Zotac's GeForce GTX 460 SE version, armed with a full GB of graphics memory and a slightly faster core clock frequency opposed to the regular SE models.