I have to admit I'm quite dissapointed by what the GeForce GTX 460 SE delivers. In most of our benchmarks we see the card trailing well behind the GeForce GTX 460 768 MB - about 7%. When compared to the 1 GB GTX 460 the difference is even 15%. Unfortunately the reduction in performance has not resulted in a significant decrease in power consumption. The card basically consumes just as much power as the GTX 460 1 GB and 768 MB. Thanks to Gainward's cooling solution fan noise under load is quite low, but idle fan noise does not seem to be optimized at all. Due to the fan settings in the BIOS the card will always run at 40% no matter if it's completely idle or fully loaded. One positive aspect is the overclocking potential which helped the card gain over 20% in real life performance - certainly a nice and easy way to maximize your investment. However, compared to other "full" GTX 460 cards that we reviewed earlier, the maximum clock potential seems a bit reduced.
Overall I find it difficult to give a recommendation for any GeForce GTX 460 SE card, rather spend a few bucks extra and go for the GTX 460 non-SE 768 MB variant which should retail for about the same price but at higher performance.