Nvidia GeForce GTX 460

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Nvidia's upcoming GeForce GTX 460 graphics card gets more real by the day, as leaks continue to flow like goals at a World Cup something that actually happens quite frequently. The GTX 460 is built from the ground up to be a mid-range part, unlike the cut-down GF100-based (and disappointing)

Chinese website Expreview, has images of the upcoming card with its retail cooler strapped on. It looks like a tiny card, though the cooler is still of the dual-slot variety, indicating that there's a fair amount of gaming power on offer.

We're anticipating two models of GTX 460, with only the different memory sizes and bandwidths differentiating them. The GPU is set to have 336 'CUDA cores', or stream processors as most rational people call them, which is only 16 less than the GTX 465 and slightly more than half the 512 that a full-fat GF100 chip can contain (remember that even the top-end GeForce GTX480 has 32 stream processors disabled).

The GPU runs at a core speed of 675MHz and the stream processors at 1,350MHz. The GTX 460 1GB has 1GB of 1,800MHz memory operating on a 256-bit bus while the 768MB version has a skinnier 192-bit bus even if it keeps the same clock speed. While it's unclear at the moment, a (presumably effective) memory speed of 1,800MHz indicates the use of cheaper GDDR3 memory, rather than the quad-pumped GDDR5 of the GTX 465, GTX 470 and GTX 480, and the ATI Radeon HD 5000-series.

The 1GB cards has a claimed retail price of $250, while the 768MB version is due to cost $230. As a teaser, apparently a stock-voltage GTX 460 was overclocked from a core frequency of 675MHz to 830MHz while the application of extra voltage managed to push the core beyond 900MHz. This overclock is claimed to have made the card match the GeForce GTX470 for performance.