It has been a while since we have been able to call an Nvidia card a “winner”, but today’s the day we see a true midrange winner with the Nvidia GeForce GTX 460. Basically the GTX 460 is one step down from the GeForce GTX 465 we saw a few months ago and is set to compete with the ATI Radeon HD 5830 which carries the same price tag. This is also the first Fermi graphics card that has launched with two, slightly different versions – a 1 GB version and a 768 MB version.

Today’s release has also seen a new core being used for the GPU. So far, the GTX 480, GTX 470 and GTX 465 have all used the Fermi GF100 core, however the new GTX 460 uses a different Fermi-based core known as the GF104. The GF104 core carries just 1.95 billion transistors compared to the 3 billion on the GF100 which helps keep prices down, power, size and temperatures down and also fairly moderate performance which brings it into the mid-range section of graphics cards.

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Just like we expected, Nvidia has released a card to fill out the lower-end of the Fermi enthusiast card section; one that will directly compete with the ATI Radeon HD 5850. The Nvidia GeForce GTX 465 is essentially the same card as the higher powered GTX 470, just with a few bits of the core disabled here and there to bring down the price point but also the power. In fact the card looks almost exactly the same as the GTX 470 – same length and same coolers.

The GeForce GTX 465 packs a 40 nm Nvidia Fermi GF-100 core on the inside, just dumbed down from the higher-end Fermi cards. The GTX 465 comes loaded with a core clocked at 607 MHz along with a shader of 1215 MHz (same as the GTX 470), 352 stream processors (down from the GTX 470′s 448) and 32 ROPS (compared to 40). Memory-wise the card comes loaded with 1 GB of GDDR5 video RAM clocked at 802 MHz on a 256-bit memory bus, which gives it a data rate of 3028 MHz.

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Shipping out in June is the new Fermi mobile iteration of the powerful Nvidia desktop graphics cards – the Nvidia GeForce GTX 480M. The new mobile GPU comes loaded with 352 CUDA cores, a 256-bit memory bus running up to 2 GB of GDDR5 memory at 1,200 MHz, and the graphics core runs at 425 MHz (around half the speed of the desktop GTX 480). Despite the low clockspeeds, the graphics card manages to pump out 897 gigaFLOPS from inside your laptop.

Alongside the release of this new chip are some new laptops from Eurocom. We’re seeing the Eurocom D900F Panther Mobile Workstation getting an upgrade to a single GTX 480M with 2GB of memory as well as the X8100 Leopard which is getting either GTX 480M SLI or HD 5870 CrossFireX in its 18.4″ display-packing body. The Eurocom Panther 2.0 should be getting a release in August and it’ll come packed with an Intel Core i7 processor up to 3.33 GHz, up to 24 GB of DDR3 RAM, up to 4 TB of storage over 4 drives, a 17.3″ 1080p display and the option of the new GTX 480M in SLI.

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So here’s a nice little device to help you pump out higher framerates on your ExpressCard equipped laptop: the MSI Graphics Upgrade Solution (GUS). Basically all you have to do is buy the device and connect a desktop graphics card to the GUS’ internals which connects to your laptop via an ExpressCard. A power brick is also required to give the GUS some extra juice to power the cards.

Unfortunately there are limits as to what cards you can put inside. The MSI Graphics Upgrade Solution only has a 7A power adapter and thus can only output a maximum of 84W to the card inside – which limits the best card you can put inside to an ATI Radeon HD 5670. Apart from that restriction, MSI’s choice of using the ExpressCard slot to transfer the card’s data means that any more powerful card would be wasted thanks to the low bandwidth of the ExpressCard slot. MSI plans for future GUSs to use USB 3 rather than ExpressCard, which is a relief.

We should be seeing more of the MSI Graphics Upgrade Solution at Computex in just over a week.

We’ve reported on the next card to the GTX 400 series before, and today we’re getting some new details about the card. Supposedly the previously known GTX 460 has been renamed to the GeForce GTX 465 as Nvidia wants the 460 name for a lower powered GF104 card rather than a GF100 card like the GTX 470/480.

Specs still remain similar to the GTX 460 we saw before, with the card sporting 1 GB of GDDR5 memory clocked effectively at 3,206 MHz on a 256-bit memory interface. 352 stream processors will be present on the card along with a 607 MHz GPU with a 1,215 MHz shader clock – which happens to be the same as the GPU on the GTX 470. The card, tested by Chinese site eNet,  is apparently faster than an ATI Radeon HD 5870 during Far Cry 2, but is worse than a HD 5830 in Crysis Warhead.

The card is rumoured to be launching next month, with more details rolling out hopefully sometime around Computex in early June.

After Apple had shockingly implemented GPU switching into their most recent refresh of the Macbook Pro line-up, trust a user to come up with an easy fix that allows you to control the switching. Cody Krieger’s gfxCardStatus application has evolved quite rapidly from a utility that just showed which GPU was in use to a full blow utility that allows you to switch between the Intel HD Graphics on-board to the more powerful and more battery consuming Nvidia GeForce GT 330M at your will.

Everyone with a 2010 model Macbook Pro with the GT 330M should check out this handy utility, available now from Cody Krieger’s website. Some users say the application is a bit buggy, but we’ll leave it to you to decide whether to try it out or not.

While Nvidia hasn’t officially said anything about the mobile version of their new “Fermi” desktop graphics card counterparts, a product page from Eurocom shares some info on the mobile GPU. The GTX 480M is available as an option for three of Eurocom’s high-end notebooks and shares with us that the card will be packing 2GB of GDDR5 memory, DirectX 11 support, a 100W power specification and a similar 40nm die as seen in the desktop Fermis.

While the specs are all well and good, the price is not so much – it’ll cost you an extra US$380 on top of the stock 1GB ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5870. Whether or not the extra performance from the Nvidia card is worth the price mark-up has still yet to be seen. The GTX 480M won’t be available in laptops until June 2010 (I keep forgetting that it’s just next month) but Eurocom is still accepting orders for laptops with the Fermi GPU.

Yeah, you read the title right – an XFX ATI Radeon HD 5970 Black Edition is up for sale on eBay… with the current bid sitting at US$999,999. The card is a yet-to-be-released special edition HD 5970 dual-GPU card, packing 4GB of GDDR5 memory (presumably 2GB per GPU) and 6 mini-DisplayPorts for a 6-monitor Eyefinity setup similar to the HD 5870 Eyefinity 6 Edition. XFX are planning to make only 1,000 of these cards with the card up for sale bearing the serial #63.

While the seller didn’t specify how he obtained this graphics card, he does state “you have no idea how hard it was for me to get this card” – maybe he stole it? He also states that he doesn’t have a box, user manual or drivers for the graphics card but he will give you the awesome gun case that the card is stored in, along with several adapters, CrossFire bridge and a Black Edition Overclocking Tool. The auction currently has 8 days to go.

Edit: It seems the million dollar bid was a fake. The current, seemingly legitimate bid is sitting at US$10,201

According to sources, Nvidia is preparing a new graphics card to go in their GTX 400 series. The GTX 460 will be the next card in the series and will match the HD 5850 in both price and performance. The new graphics card could be launching as early as June 1 in time for Computex.

The GTX 460 will apparently use the same PCB as the GTX 470 but come with only 1GB of GDDR5 memory (down from 1280 MB on the GTX 470) on a 256-bit bus (down from 320-bit) as well as other lowered specs. Expreview also notes that there will be no standard design for the GTX 460 so companies such as Asus, Gigabyte, XFX, EVGA, etc. will be able to produce their own card designs.

More info on this new card should be available closer to the release date

Today we’re taking a deep look into which out of the two flagship single-GPU graphics cards from ATI and Nvidia is the better buy for your system. The Nvidia GeForce GTX 480 was released into the realm of graphics cards just last week, and the ATI Radeon HD 5870 has been with us for a good six months now.

Both cards support the latest and greatest DirectX 11 technology, each with their own specifications, performance upsides, extra features and also downsides. And each card has a different price point. We look at hopefully everything there is to each of the cards to determine which card is most deserving of your hard-worked cash. Let’s start off with the specifications of each card.

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