GTX460 SLi overclocked, mated and put in context

1. GTX 460 SLi Intro2. First up, does anyone use SLi ?3. Know your history4. Hardware but no software5. Game Changes as Screens Stop Growing6. Multi-GPU will get better, but it's a must for AMD7. GTX460: Vanilla, overclocked and mated8. Tri-SLi ? nVidia was smart not to try9. View All Pages

Tri-SLi ?  nVidia was smart not to try

It seems that our introduction was correct.

The market for 2 cards in SLi/CrossFire formation is already small, so the market for 3 or more cards must be absolutely tiny.

nVidia has made the wise choice of not bothering to include multiple SLi connection ports, as this rather explicit close up reveals.

One port means you can double your graphics potential, but adding a 3^rd of 4^th card would put the consumer in the price space for a much more powerful single card.

With a launch price of around £195 inc vat for the 768MB EVGA GTX460 OC card, buying 2 of them costs almost the same as a GTX480 and 3 would cost you way more:-

GTX460 £195, 2nd GTX460 £390, GTX480 £399, 3rd GTX460 £537

One last question remains.

With such a variety of coolers available on the GTX460 at launch, are there any issues that you need to be aware of ?

MSI SLi ?  It fits, but it's really, really close.

Very strange that our good friends at MSI have gone to market with this rather bizarre ‘flower’ cooler.

While MSI's solution may have good heat dissipation properties (we’ll be checking into that claim shortly), it could make SLi difficult to implement on the board we used.

We’re not saying you can't have SLi, we’re just saying that you might want to pop into a store like YOYOTech first. Somewhere that let's you look at product before you buy it and consider the technical challenges.  For example, with the MSI GTX460 you can decide if there's enough clearance between the PCI Express slots to allow a second card to fit comfortably onto your mainboard. You won't have an issue with the EVGA SR2 or MSI Big Bang, but you need to check clearances carefully with smaller boards.

KitGuru GTX460 SLi Conclusion?

It works. It most definitely works.

The cards are powerful, affordable and play nice with each other. Also, they are not big (see the size compared to a Blackberry). Which means you can use shorter chassis and still have fun.

KitGuru says: Buying one overclocked 768MB EVGA GTX460 now and adding a second in 6-12 months time is the most sensible Fermi buying advice KitGuru can give anyone who desires nVidia DX11 graphics. As nVidia would put it, GTX460 is Fermi done right.

Read our single card analysis over here and discuss in our forums.

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