The GTX 460 GF104 line is the second version of the Fermi GF100 cores and is created to target the midrange mainstream market for NVIDIA. When NVIDIA tried to chop the original Fermi core up into the GTX 470 and GTX 465 especially, performance dropped while power consumption remained high. As such, a new chip had to be designed, the GF104. Usually, in the video card industry, companies will take a product and then improve it as they go along by building upon what works and cutting out what doesn’t. The new core has been redesigned to be more efficient with less fluff than its predecessor, having over a billion less transistors than the GF100 core. What this means is that the new core design is more specialized toward gaming (and video editing). The lowered transistor count also means less heat and core size, making it cheaper for NVIDIA to build and more importantly sell. Texture units have been increased while render units have remained the same in comparison to the GTX 465, and an increase of 48 shader processors (over 32 of the first implementation) per 7 streaming multiprocessors, giving a total of 336 shader processors. One SM has been disabled, but depending on if it was laser-cut out or not, it might be possible to re-enable to give a total of 384 SP! Not everything is better over the first Fermi iteration; there are some losses, such as being able to only use two in SLI, and lowered tessellation performance than the original. By having less heat output and complexity, the speeds were ramped up compared to the GTX 465 and should bring the performance even higher. Inno3D has taken the liberty of overclocking the new graphics card coupled with 1GB of memory. Time to see how it compares to the GTX 465!