EVGA GTX 460 2WIN
Introduction
The GeForce GTX 460 proved to be an extremely popular graphics card from Nvidia, offering some excellent gaming value to consumers in the mid-range market segment. But it also avoided much of the high temperature problems exhibited by its flagship GTX 470/480 siblings because custom heatsinks from various manufacturers could tame the heat on the 460.
EVGA has decided to take that popular card and essentially twin (2WIN…..twin, to win…) a pair of those GF104 chips onto a single PCB design. While Nvidia has offered dual-GPU cards before, its success has been spotty. High heat, noise levels, and power consumption, along with questionable driver support and game implementation, were major detractions to what was otherwise an innovative idea. The GTX 460 2WIN doesn’t really have a direct predecessor other than the single-GPU GTX 460 in a sense, and EVGA has engineered this new card from the ground up. With claims of beating a GTX 580, this new EVGA card has some big performance numbers to hit in order to reach that goal.
One of the new innovations on the EVGA GTX 460 2WIN that shows the great strides made over previous generation cards is the ability to run 3D Vision Surround to a single card now without the need for SLI on two separate cards. And the triple fan setup on the custom heatsink looks to keep the temperatures respectable for long fragging sessions.
Let’s take a closer look at the EVGA GTX 460 2WIN and see if this beast can impress us on the test bench.