Only a short month after the launch of the GeForce GTX 465, NVIDIA is back again with a new card: the GeForce GTX 460. Built on their brand-new GF104 GPU, the GTX 460 shakes up the mainstream in a big way by bringing NVIDIA's DX11 Fermi family to a $199 card and in the process righting what was wrong with the GTX 465. Along the way we'll also see just what NVIDIA did to the GF104 GPU to make this happen, and why GF104 is much more than the simple GF100 derivative we were expecting.

It's been a while since we've been able to write a glowing review of an NVIDIA card, but today we'll see why NVIDIA is offering the right combination of price and performance to claim the $200-$250 market as their own.

 

Only a short month after the launch of the GeForce GTX 465, NVIDIA is back again with a new card: the GeForce GTX 460. Built on their brand-new GF104 GPU, the GTX 460 shakes up the mainstream in a big way by bringing NVIDIA's DX11 Fermi family to a $199 card and in the process righting what was wrong with the GTX 465. Along the way we'll also see just what NVIDIA did to the GF104 GPU to make this happen, and why GF104 is much more than the simple GF100 derivative we were expecting.

It's been a while since we've been able to write a glowing review of an NVIDIA card, but today we'll see why NVIDIA is offering the right combination of price and performance to claim the $200-$250 market as their own.

 

Last month we mentioned NVIDIA's plans for their upcoming drivers: the 256 series of drivers (don't ask us why they jumped from 197 to 256). Today, NVIDIA has released the first beta of the 256 drivers. We'll keep this short as our previous article already covered what this release entails, but you can read the full press release or just grab the drivers from NVIDIA and start testing. If you need a few buzz words to keep you interested, the new release boosts GTX 400 performance while adding support for Blu-ray 3D, CUDA 3.1, and OpenGL 4.0.

Galaxy have pleasantly surprised us, and the folks at vr-zone.  To the table, they bring their GTX 470 GC, a 100% non-reference design graphics card utilising an NVIDIA GeForce Fermi 470 GPU.  Measuring 9 inches (compared to the reference 9.5 inches) and featuring a blue PCB, Galaxy have essentially mated a graphics card with a robot figurine.

This 470 uses a quad heatpipe design, aluminium fins and a detachable fan (to help with cleaning) in order to cool the pre-overclocked behemoth; the core recieves a mild overclock of 18Mhz to 625Mhz, whereas shaders and memory stay at the reference 1250Mhz and 3348Mhz (effective) respectively.  This combines with the standard GTX 470 fare - DirectX 11, 448 CUDA Cores, 1280MB of GDDR5 memory, a 320-bit wide interface and 4x SLI compatible.

Check out the full story at VR-Zone.

Now that the week of the 12th is upon us, let's see how a quick stock check at the usual suspects turns out.

Although not all of the GTX 400 series cards from the initial wave have reached etailers yet, it looks like the bulk of the cards have come in and gone out the door. Newegg, ZipZoomFly, and MWave all have had cards going in and out of stock all day long, while Best Buy and Amazon are still backordered/pre-ordering. Meanwhile pricing is highly variable with MSRP cards selling out quickly while you can still find and buy a card if you're willing to pay a $30-$50 premium.

So who has what cards and where? Read on to find out.