At the very end of May we saw NVIDIA’s first effort to expand Fermi beyond the $300 space with the GeForce GTX 465, a further cut-down GF100 core priced at launch at $279. Unfortunately for NVIDIA, it wasn’t even a lackluster launch – while GF100 performs quite well with most of its functional units enabled (i.e. GTX 480), disabling additional units isn’t doing the GPU any favors. Furthermore disabling those units does little to temper the chip’s high power draw – something that’s only reasonable on the higher-end cards – resulting in a card that ate a lot of power while losing to AMD’s Radeon HD 5850.

In short, the GTX 465 is a lesson of how you can only cut down GPU so far. NVIDIA went too far, and ended up with a part that had GTX 285 performance and GTX 470 power consumption.

Today NVIDIA is back in the saddle with something entirely new: GF104 and the GTX 460. The second member of the Fermi family is ready for its day in the sun, and in many ways it’s nothing like we expected. Designed from the start as a smaller chip than GF100, GF104 is the basis of the GTX 460 line of products which fix the GTX 465’s ills while delivering the GTX 465’s performance. It’s what the GTX 465 should have been, and it’s priced as low as $199. And as we’ll see, it’s the first NVIDIA card in a long time that we can give a glowing review for.

GF104, the heart of the GTX 460 series being launched today, is the first waterfall part of the Fermi family. As we saw with AMD’s Radeon HD 5000 series last year and NVIDIA’s GeForce 9000 series before that, NVIDIA is in the process of taking the base GF100 design and reducing it for the construction of smaller, lower performing GPUs suitable for use in video cards at lower prices for the larger markets.

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• READ MORE (Source): NVIDIA’s GeForce GTX 460: The $200 King – AnandTech :: Your Source for Hardware Analysis and News