ECS GeForce GTX 460 1GB Black Video Card Review

The retail package for the GTX 460 1GB is similar to that of their other Black series products with a black background, silver product logos and white lettering for everything else aside from the green NVIDIA features box on the side. Since the main features are obvious, let’s flip the box over.

On the side viewable here you can see that a minimum power supply required for single GPU use is 450W with 24A on the 12v+ rail being used, and this is based on a 3.2GHz Intel Core i7 system. The right hand side lists the technologies the card utilizes in 8 languages (not in English), including OpenGL 4.0, DirectX 11, Shader Model 5.0, NVIDIA SLI, PureVideo, etc. The left side shows images from the incredibly immersive and visually stunning titles of Metro 2033 and Just Cause 2 in 3D.

Sliding out the inner cardboard box there is a 1/2″ deep tray which holds the accessories for the ECS GTX 460 1GB Black.

Upon removing the tray we see the ECS GTX 460 1GB Black packed nice and tight in its anti-static jacket.

Here we have everything that was included in the bundle: two dual-molex to PCIe connectors, one DVI to VGA connector, one DVI to HDMI connector and the driver disk. All of the accessories came in baggies which had “Lead-Free ROHS compliant” stickers on them so I figured it was somewhat important. From this angle the Arctic Cooling heatsink doesn’t look too terribly tall, but we’ll get into that shortly.

The driver disk came with a fairly simple installer, which included ForceWare driver kit version 257.21 dated 6/8/2010, and also includes a trial of Badaboom media converter which uses full GPU acceleration with CUDA. The Badaboom trail is version 1.2.1.40 and is dated 8/20/2009.