Nvidia GeForce GTX 460 SLI review

The fear that used to be attached to running an SLI setup has largely vanished by the wayside over the last year or so. Thanks to maturing driver sets and great mid-range cards, there really has never been a better time to drop in that second card. And with the incredi-card, the GTX 460, there's rarely been a better SLI card either.

Thankfully, the thrill that was attached to the idea of running a bleeding-edge SLI system hasn't gone, but is now a more practical solution. In fact you may find us telling you that in many cases, two really is better than one.

Previously we'd have always said that for the best day-to-day performance for your money you should always go for the fastest single-GPU card that your bank balance would allow.

Now it's not so black and white, because even the high-end cards are struggling to compete with a pair of midrange wonders like the GTX 460.

The GTX 460 arrived last month and wowed us with its double-ended loving of both fantastic value and great 3D performance. The only slight fly in the ointment was the fact that it arrived in two very different spins from the outset.

We had both the full-fat 1GB versions and the cut-down 768MB cards. With barely £20 separating them it was a no-brainer at that level which card to go for: the 1GB card, especially at the higher-end of the desktop resolution scale.

The limited memory size and bus, combined with fewer ROPs, meant that the 768MB card suffered by comparison to its smarter sibling. Both versions of the card, though, carry the same redesigned Fermi GPU from Nvidia.

The GF104 chip is a far more streamlined version of the original Fermi chip that powers the £400 GTX 480. Nvidia has managed to cram more of the good stuff into less streaming multiprocessors, making for a high-performing card that costs far less to produce.