NVIDIA Launches GeForce GTX 460 SE

NVIDIA’s been the target of a couple rumors over the past month, and so far, one of them came true. Of course, I’m referring to the GeForce GTX 580, the new reigning champion where single-GPU performance is concerned. At the same time, a “GTX 460 SE” has also been rumored, but its potential market position was far from clear. Well, as the title here suggests, the card is real. Its marketing position is still not so clear, however.

To help put things into perspective, here’s NVIDIA’s now-current line-up:

The “SE” in GTX 460 SE can’t mean “Special Edition”, unless special refers to that kind of “special”. The card as a whole compared to the standard GTX 460 1GB is a bit gimped, in that it has slower clocks overall, and a bunch of CUDA cores cut out. At the same time, the 1GB of memory the SE has, along with the wider memory bus width, improves things over the 768MB version. Where does that leave us?

The card features more memory, but lower speeds, less CUDA cores and overall degraded Shader clocks. The card doesn’t quite hit GTS 450 territory, but the question must be begged… where on earth does the GTX 460 SE fit into NVIDIA’s product line-up? NVIDIA states that the pricing of the SE should be on par with the 768MB version, confusing things even further.

We might have to chalk this up as being an odd move by NVIDIA, but to make sure, we’ll get one in and put it through its paces.