Sometimes in this industry you see products that ooze innovation. Now by any given standard that does not always mean brilliant ideas, but yeah ... innovation and differentiation is always downright interesting at the very least. One innovative product that dropped like a bomb into the market a couple of weeks ago is the KFA2/Galaxy GeForce GTX 460 WHDI with the card transmitting a wireless signal to your HDTV. An idea that originates from Intel actually, as they also have WHDI solutions these days.
But think about it ... a graphics card with no monitor connectors attached to it, yet when you look at the HDTV you see your desktop in 1920x1080P perfectly clear and fine, all transmitted through the air. Duuuude -- that's like Star Trek for real -- I mean 1920x1080 is 2 million pixels at 32-bit with 60 refreshes each second as well.
The concept surely is miraculous and even weirder, it works surprisingly well !
Yep, today we test a GeForce GTX 460 based on that concept, all that hardware lovin' is based and placed onto custom PCB design, the card is silent and highly overclockable offering very nice mid-range performance. And within a distance of 100 feet / 33 Meters you can beam a 1080P signal towards a television or monitor, as long as it has an HDMI input, you should be good to go really.
It does that by placing a 5 GHz band wireless receiver/transmitter onto the graphics card which and when we looked at it first, we felt that the sheer looks resemble the facehugger from the movie Aliens, what ya don't believe me ? Hah .. you better look at the photo below the fold my man.
Anyway, the wireless signal is transmitted towards a small receiver box that feeds of a 5V adapter and plugs in directly into your HDTV through an HDMI connector.
When you think of it, it could be a brilliant idea for business presentations but even more so home usage, with the PC too far away from your scrumptious and luscious 1080P telly you can connect it and then game with friends or watch pictures and a nice movie in 1080P without the need to have a fully blown HTPC next to your telly.
Of course the demographic for a card like this is small, but for a small selection of you guys it might be the solution for a problem we didn't know existed ... handy wireless monitor connectivity.
Well, I've just threw up all hints and downright weird puns towards the product we test today, meet the KFA2 (Galaxy) GTX 460 WHDI, head on over to the next page where we'll startup the review.
Oh and come on ... am I the only one seeing the facehugger resemblance from Alien in there ?
The WHDI functionality explained
So then, WHDI is short for Wireless Home Digital Interface. The KFA2 GTX 460 WHDI Edition started to ship a couple of weeks ago. You'll prolly have a hard time finding it as we expect maybe just hundreds to be available worldwide in this first trial.
But let me start by saying, this thing just oozes innovation, for that alone I already like it very much.
The coolest thing about this video card is that it is designed to connect wirelessly to a TV using an uncompressed connection, that's right ... uncompressed e.g. lossless. To do so the solution is making use of Intel's WHDI developed by AMIMON, though their solution's latency is higher and less suited for interactive tasks. It is the technology that will be featured in the newest device developed by KFA2/Galaxy.
KFA2/Galaxy's solution manages this with a latency of less than one millisecond making their solution appropriate even for gaming. Obviously the card allows you to stream content to your TV like media video's, movies, digital photos and well whatever you need to be shown really.
The GTX 460 has a transmitter module that works in the 5 GHz RF band. To elaborate on that, common wireless routers these days use the 2.4 GHz RF band, and the latest 300 MBit N models have a dual-band options to use the 5 GHz band. It's still a slightly unused frequency and has a lot less data-pollution. Also when you fire up the microwave your signal won't drop hehe .. that's right, a microwave functions roughly at the 2400 MHz range as well, hence you prolly have noticed your internet fail when you heated up dinner :)
So at the backside of the GTX 460 WHDI you'll spot five antennas sticking out the back of the video card beaming your content towards a small black receiver box that you connect to an HDMI input on your HDTV set. You are not forced to use the wireless connection though, the video card comes with DVI and HDMI outputs as well.
So at the television side of things, you place a small receiver box, give it power, connect it to the HDMI input of your television and once you power on your PC the rest will be done automatically. There's no need for configuration, the two devices will make a handshake and boom, you have PC signal at your 1280x720P or 1920x1080P television. Rather impressive.
What about audio ?
That's covered, this solution is transmitting audio as well, but that does come with minor limitations. Dolby Digital / DTS 2.0 and 5.1 are properly supported, but DD Plus and True HD will be outputted as core AC3 as Dolby Digital 5.1 channels. Now that might be a limitation or hinder for some, but really it's still fantastic DD 5.1 audio traveling through nothing but the air. So yeah, you can hook up the device to a AV receiver over HDMI and then pass it onwards to the telly as well. So to recap, Traditional Dolby Digital / DTS 5.1 is supported and come think of it, uncompressed LPCM 7.1 channel audio is also supported.
We'll show you later on, that the receiver box also comes with a small USB connector, allowing it to be firmware upgraded if at all needed in the future.
Now this is the bold part, the rough simplicity of how it works, and it's that simplicity that impresses me the most.
So let me clearly state that you are not limited... the black receiver box connects via a wire to an HDTV (High Definition TV) and relays that information that the PC is transmitting, you are not restricted to just movies or other video files, this is the monitor signal being transmitted.
The videocard itself
Though the graphics card itself is a GeForce GTX 460 with 1024 MB gDDR5 memory running at reference frequency, it of course is a 100% customized model. First lets talk reference specs.
The GeForce GTX 460 series is based on the 2.1 Billion transistor GF104 GPU. The GF104 is a less complicated chip to manufacture as the smaller transistor count directly relates to yields, heat levels, better voltages and thus a better TDP as well. It is a smaller chip to produce.
NVIDIA puts the GF104 chip onto two products, the GeForce GTX 460 with 768MB of graphics memory and the GeForce GTX 460 with 1024MB of memory. For the bigger part of the specification the two are similar when it comes to shader processor count, memory bus and clock frequencies, the 1GB model however definitely will be a good chunk faster, as cutting away 256MB of memory also cuts away a chunk of the ROP engine.
| Graphics card | GeForce GTX 460 768MB | GeForce GTX 460 1024MB | GeForce GTX 465 1024MB |
| Graphics Processing Clusters | 2 | 2 | 3 |
| Streaming Multiprocessors | 7 | 7 | 11 |
| Shader processor | 336 | 336 | 352 |
| Texture Units | 56 | 56 | 44 |
| ROPs | 24 | 32 | 32 |
| Core Clock | 675 MHz | 675 MHz | 607 MHz |
| Shader Clock | 1350 MHz | 1350 MHz | 1215 MHz |
| Memory Data rate | 3600 MHz | 3600 MHz | 3200 MHz |
| Graphics Memory | 768MB GDDR5 | 1024MB GDDR5 | 1024MB GDDR5 |
| Memory interface | 192-bit | 256-bit | 256-bit |
| Memory bandwidth | 86.4 GB/s | 115.2 GB/s | 102.6 GB/S |
| Texture Fillrate Bilinear | 37.8 GigaTexels/sec | 37.8 GigaTexels/sec | 26.7 GigaTexels/sec |
| Fab node | 40nm | 40nm | 40nm |
| TDP | 150 Watts | 160 Watts | 200 Watts |
Okay, so back to the two reference SKUs, we can break down real simple:
- GeForce GTX 460 768MB - 336 Shader processor - 56 TMUs - 24 ROPs - TDP 150W
- GeForce GTX 460 1024MB -336 Shader processor - 56 TMUs - 32 ROPs - TDP 160W
The KFA2/Galaxy GTX 560 WHDI card is a 1024MB model, it runs in a reference setup and is clocked at 675 MHz on the core frequency, and in NVIDIA's typical 1:2 setup mode 1350 MHz on the 336 shader processors.
We'll actually test this with the WHDI card as well, but there is a lot of overclocking headroom on the board as 825 MHz should not be an issue (without voltage tweaking). The gDDR5 memory will be clocked at a slightly shy 3.6 Gbps which is 3600MHz effective (quad data rate).
For your reference, the 768MB versions makes use of three 64-bit memory controllers which boils down to 192-bit memory, and the 1024 GB model has one extra cluster of 256MB attached to it, which requires one more 64-bit memory controller and so this one operates at 256-bit memory bus width.
Anyway, talk is cheap, let's go have a look at what we are talking about today in a nice product gallery, describing some of the features a little better.
Installation and setup
So how do you install complicated technology like shown today ? Well, it really is surprizingly simple ..
First off, once the card is seated into the PC make sure you connect the external power connectors (6-pin PEG power connectors). Preferably get yourself a power supply that has these PCIe PEG connectors native (converting them from a Molex Peripheral connector, anno 2010, we feel is a no-go).
On the HDTV side we take the receiver box, we connect the HDMI cable into the box and HDTV (or alternatively your AV-Receiver) and connect the power adapter. That's it, you can now power up the PC and on your HDTV at the proper HDMI channel you'll notice a handshake being made at one of the four available 5 GHz channels. After a few seconds much like a monitor you'll have PC output (even BIOS info) shown on the HDTV.
Now here we booted into Windows 7 64-bit. The graphics card was recognized by a previously installed driver, but unfortunately whatever we tried ... we couldn't select anything higher than 1280x720P.
Puzzled as we where we could quickly resolve that issue by simply re-installing the latest GeForce ForceWare driver.
Once done we boot into Windows, install the latest drivers and after a reboot all should be working. We had one issue left though, the HDTV was detected as 1080i signal, and that did not look rather good at all.
To fix that, simply go to the NVIDIA Control Panel and select 1080P, once we applied that properly we had pretty impressive signal on the HDTV as we'll show you later on in a video. We double checked and rebooted, Windows 7 booted then properly into 1080P mode. No further configuration is required or needed unless you like to tweak settings, for which you can open the driver's control panel.
Again, no configuration is needed for the wireless part, you connect the receiver box and power it up, select the HDMI channel on the HDTV and you are good to go.
With that said, let's have a closer look at the components and bundled items.
Product Gallery
Alright, let's sift through the product and bundled items. First up boxing and packaging. The product comes in a standard carton packaging safely secured in Styrofoam.
In the package you'll find the GTX 460 graphics cards, 1 GB model with reference (675 MHz Core / 3600 MHz memory) clock frequency. With the card comes five wireless antennas and a USB pass through cable which can be used to transmit and receive data coming from the 'front-end' receiver box. Also you'll find two p-pin PEG PCie power converter cables and a nice quality HDMI cable.
The receiver box itself comes with a USB cable and a cradle so you can mount it in an upright position. Other items are a power adapter for that receiver box. Obviously also a manual and GeForce driver CD are included.
Here we have a close-up of the receiver box, this is the device you place close to (or behind) your Full HD television. On a 24" monitor, this is about the real size. Two activity lights can be found, one for a network and one for the video link.
When we peek at the backside of the device we can see the power intput, HDMI connector (lead it towards your HDTV or AV Receiver with HDMI input) and a small USB port.
The USB port can be utilized for two things, first .. if you pop in a USB Flash disk with accompanying firmware, you can upgrade that firmware. And that will be needed for secondary functionality.
Though it is not supported right now, in the near future Galaxy/KFA2 will issue a firmware update that will allow you to use the USB port for say a keyboard/mouse combo. That way you can have your PC at the upper floor, while downstairs in the living room you watch a movie over this solution AND can control it with a media keyboard / mouse.
This is still a work in progress though, and currently Galaxy only has a firmware available supporting a couple of Logitech devices, other than that controlling your PC will need to be dealt with by a powerful wireless keyboard/remote.
The receiver box also comes with a small cradle .. you can place the device in an upright position. Other than that it has no functionality. The receiver can be easily hidden behind your telly as well, it is that small.
The graphics card as stated is a reference clocked GeForce GTX 460 with 1GB gDDR5 graphics memory. Its however completely customized, let's have a closer look.
Here you can see it already, the PCB is much longer as it needs to house the AMIMON WHDI components (Power Amplifier module/ARM CPU/ Decoder chip). Pointing outwards are five headers for the 5 wireless antennas. You can however also connect the card over DVI or HDMI.
Here we also see two LED lights, once the receiver and this card create a handshake they'll lit up. This literally takes seconds and is an automated process, you do not need to configure anything at all.
On the backside of the card we see a clean blue PCB, slightly larger than normal, roughly 11 inches / 27 CM. The one thing missing here is an SLI connector, so SLI I'm afraid is not a possibility unless there's software SLI support, but I doubt that.
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