NVIDIA quietly released their GeForce GTX 460 SE. According to NVIDIA, GTX 460 SE is designed to give a good price-performance level without compromising on memory amount or bandwidth. It retains 1 GB of GDDR5 memory across a 256-bit wide memory interface of the GTX 460 1 GB variant, but has a lower CUDA core count of 288. Clock speeds on the GeForce GTX 460 SE are slightly lower, too.

NVIDIA has disabled a second SM block when compared to the other GTX 460 versions. In return for this decrease in performance, the GTX 460 SE features 1 GB memory which means that the full memory controller is used resulting in higher bandwidth for the GPU of the GTX 460 SE. GeForce GTX 460 SE is a full implementation of the reference design, but Gainward has designed their own PCB and cooling solution to go with the card. Gainward is very close to Palit and focuses on the European market while Palit operates globally - both companies are using the same graphics card designs.

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The card basically consumes just as much power as the GTX 460 1 GB and 768 MB. Thanks to Gainward's cooling solution fan noise under load is quite low, but idle fan noise does not seem to be optimized at all. Due to the fan settings in the BIOS the card will always run at 40% no matter if it's completely idle or fully loaded. One positive aspect is the overclocking potential which helped the card gain over 20% in real life performance - certainly a nice and easy way to maximize your investment. However, compared to other "full" GTX 460 cards that we reviewed earlier, the maximum clock potential seems a bit reduced.