Last week NVIDIA quietly released their new GeForce GTX 460 SE version and according to them, the SE is designed to give a good price to performance level without compromising on memory amount or bandwidth. Being it retains 1GB of GDDR5 memory across a 256-bit wide memory interface like the GeForce GTX 460 variant, but has a lower shader core count of only 288 instances. The clock speeds on the GeForce GTX 460 SE are slightly lower, too. We talked to several board partners about the GeForce GTX 460 SE and they say that consumers are mostly ignoring the GeForce GTX 460 with 768MB due to reduced memory size and demand an affordable 1GB variant, which the SE delivers. - techPowerUp

Gainward GeForce GTX 460 1GB SE Graphics Review

Architecturally speaking, NVIDIA has disabled a second block when compared to such other GeForce GTX 460 versions. In return for this decrease in performance, the GeForce GTX 460 SE variant features 1GB memory which means that the full memory controller is used resulting in higher bandwidth for the graphics chipset. Specs wise Gainward's GeForce GTX 460 SE version is an full implementation of the reference design, though Gainward has designed their own PCB and cooling solution to go with the graphics card. Gainward is very close to Palit and focuses on the European market while Palit operates globally and share product designs.

The Gainward package has about the typical size for a board in this performance range. The front shows some product highlights, while the back has more general marketing on the product. The SE edition from Gainward looks almost identical to other GeForce GTX 460 variants from Palit and Gainward. You may combine up to two GeForce GTX 460 SE cards in SLI for better performance or improved image quality settings. We found it quite surprising that Gainward put two 6-pin PCI Express power connectors on their card. Such an output config would be good for 225W which is well over the 146W that we measured in Furmark.

We have to admit we are quite dissapointed by what those GeForce GTX 460 SE delivers. In most of our benchmarks we see these cards trailing well behind the GeForce GTX 460 768MB and when compared to the 1GB version the difference is even greater. Unfortunately the reduction in performance has not resulted in a significant decrease in power consumption. The card basically consumes just as much power as other GeForce GTX 460 versions. Thanks to Gainward's cooling solution fan noise under load is quite low, but idle fan noise does not seem to be optimized. Due to the fan settings the card always runs at 40% no matter what.

One positive aspect is the overclocking potential which helped the card gain over twenty percent in real life performance which is certainly a nice and easy way to maximize your investment. However, when compared to other full GeForce GTX 460 graphics cards that we checked earlier, the maximum clock potential seems somehow reduced. Overall we do find it difficult to give a recommendation for any GeForce GTX 460 SE video card version, rather spend a few bucks extra and go for their GeForce GTX 460 768MB variant which should retail for about the same price but at higher performance.