In surprisingly quick turn-around from rumour to announcement, it appears that NVIDIA's trimmed-down GeForce GTX 460 SE will soon be heading to retailers, only ten days after we first caught wind of it.
The card will be based on the same GF104 die that powers the original GTX 460 with an additional streaming multiprocessor (SM) disabled. This means that the SE will ship with six active 48-core units for a total of 288 shaders, compared to 336 on the older cards.
The core will run at 650MHz, which works out to a shader frequency of 1,300MHz, and the 1GB GDDR5 frame-buffer will be clocked at 3,400MHz. Despite slower clock-speeds than its forbearers, the new card will have a slight memory-bandwidth advantage over the 768MB GTX 460 thanks to a wider 256-bit bus.
The outputs give plenty of flexibility, with two dual-link DVI ports, one HDMI and one DisplayPort connector adorning the backplate - although this is probably specific to Zotac's take on the card. SLI is still present and accounted for, but as with the other GTX 460s, you can only link two of the cards together.
Based on what we know about the GTX 460 SE, it's safe to assume that performance will fall squarely between the older 336-core GPUs and the 192-core GTS 450. Unfortunately, we don't have any details on pricing just yet, but we'd expect a MSRP of £110-120. Even though this is very close to the pricing of the slightly more powerful 768MB GTX 460 - some of which can be found for as little as £115 - we'd expect the older cards to be phased out in the near future. It's possible that the price of the GTS 450 might fall a bit as well, giving the card a bit more room to breathe.
At this point, we aren't certain on when the card will be released - it isn't listed with any of the usual retailers - but it should be available sometime in the next week or so. Interestingly, NVIDIA doesn't seem to have announced the card yet and the only official confirmation that we have is from ZOTAC.
UPDATE: ZOTAC jumped the gun a little, but NVIDIA has now made the GTX 460 SE official. No definitive release date, but pricing should by in the same sort of region as the 768MB GTX 460, so between £120 and £130.
