Tuesday, August 31st 2010
Colorful Unveils GeForce GTX 460 iGame Graphics Card
Colorful has come up with beastly-looking GeForce GTX 460 graphics card, that makes use of a shark-inspired GPU cooler design, coupled with an equally capable VRM design to facilitate a core clock speed of 900 MHz (vs. 675 MHz reference). The Colorful iGame GTX 460 custom-design PCB of the card makes use of a 6+1 phase VRM, with voltage-measure points. With two BIOS EEPROM chips installed, a switch allows users to choose between the two BIOS chips when the system is powered down. Apart from helping maintain two clock and fan profiles, the feature protects against overly-ambitious BIOS modifications by adding some redundancy. Apart from 900 MHz (core), the CUDA cores are clocked at 1800 MHz, and the memory at 1050 MHz (4200 MHz effective).
The cooler makes use of aggressive-looking shroud design that is inspired from shark-fins. Underneath it is a dense aluminum fin array that sits right on top of the GPU. The GPU base has four 8 mm thick heat pipes that make direct contact with the GPU. Two of these heat pipes convey the heat to the main aluminum fin array, and two to a smaller aluminum fin array that is positioned right on top of the VRM area. A backplate decks up the reverse side of the PCB. Colorful will release this card to the Asian market in September.
More pictures follow:
Update Sep 28, 2010: We received a review sample for TechPowerUp now and the correct clock speeds are 675/900 in normal mode and 820/1000 in Turbo mode. According to Colorful, the "900 MHz" information was leaked by some 3rd party and never confirmed by the vendor itself.
Source:
PCPop
The cooler makes use of aggressive-looking shroud design that is inspired from shark-fins. Underneath it is a dense aluminum fin array that sits right on top of the GPU. The GPU base has four 8 mm thick heat pipes that make direct contact with the GPU. Two of these heat pipes convey the heat to the main aluminum fin array, and two to a smaller aluminum fin array that is positioned right on top of the VRM area. A backplate decks up the reverse side of the PCB. Colorful will release this card to the Asian market in September.
49 Comments on Colorful Unveils GeForce GTX 460 iGame Graphics Card
900 MHz core clock....pci-e extensions...original cooler design...DO WANT!
perhaps the company itself decided to only sell/ship to the asian market now.
so I guess it doesnt take a second core revision to unlock all the SP's on die?
cheers largon.
Seing how good GF104 is in comparison, if Nvidia has another chip in their sleeves that's going to be a "GF104"-like GPU with 3 clusters instead of 2. IMO that would definately compete and even beat a Southern Islands all while being smaller than GF100 so they would be in a better situation than now (GF100 has 3.1 billion transistors, GF104 has 1.9, so 1.9 + 50% will always be less than GF100). But IMO they could even aim a little bit higher and take a "minor" risk and release a real monster. That mosnter would be the aforementioned 3 cluster "GF104-like" chip but instead of 48 SP (3x16) per SM, it would have 4x16= 64 SP.
Architecturally it makes all the sense: GF104 is superscalar with 2 warps schedulers, but only 3 SIMD execution units. That doesn't make a lot of sense, since in one clock cycle it can issue two warps, but on the next only one can be issued, hence the move to 4 SIMD units is unnavoidable. Now, regarding the die size of such a chip, if you compare GF104 and GF100 it's clear that adding the extra 16 SPs into the SM did not increase transistor budget a lot, considering they also doubled SFUs and TMUs on GF104. GF104 is way more than 75% of a GF100, but has 60% the transistor count and die area. IMO Nvidia might be in a position right now to release that chip consisting of 3.2-3.4 billion transistors and around 560 mm^2 die area at 40nm (not the biggest chip Nvidia has ever done). It would be a risk, yeah, again yeah, but a risk that may very well pay off, we are talking about a chip not much bigger than GF100 but with 768 SPs! But that's where the Fermi architecture was created to go and beyond that. Next on 28nm, who knows, it could be 4 clusters with maybe 96 SPs (6x16) per SM and 6 SMs per cluster for a total of 2304 SPs!! (Impossible? R600 started off with 320, Cypress has 1600, SI will have how many?)
Nevermind just a little bit of speculation...
As of GF104: It's taking them too long to unlock them tbh. I've been wondering lately, if they are not into price fixing practices again (Ati and Nvidia). AMD doesn't lower prices, Nvidia does not want to be aggresive with GF104, it makes me wonder, really.
The excuse with GF104 has been "improving yields" (although those excuses come from the rumor mill), but no one with a brain believes that. OC potential is so vast that there's never been a valid excuse for not releasing the card at 750-800 Mhz stock. And if clocks are so good there's no way they cannot get 25%-40% of the dies with full 384 SPs and 800 Mhz capable, which is what they would need to create an SKU capable of beating GTX470/HD5870.
Nvidia's high end user base seems to, by-and-large, not care much about the heat and power consumption, which is the main put down of the AMD fanboys.
and a big +1 on a fully enabled (384-sp) 800mhz+ GF104 to ceat the GTX470 and most of the time a 5870 too IMO.
EDIT, check out this speculation thread I made :)
GF104 refresh, GTX475 speculation
I sure know I love reading about it here :toast:
She loves the gpu also! :eek:
hi, steven.
Now we got offices in germany, and korea,,,,but no one in USA.
Maybe you could suggest me some dealer there, i could introduce them our nice card.
then you could get one or two pcs from them
how do you think about it?
How they could not know of any retailers here I don't know?
But, I like most Americans tend to think we are the epicenter of all things.
I would love to get my hands on a couple of those though.
She sounds open to testing out the market here.
Maybe someone should ask for a card to review.