Nvidia's GF100 Turns Into GeForce GTX 480 and 470 132
crazipper writes "After months of talking architecture and functionality, Nvidia is finally going public with the performance of its $500 GeForce GTX 480 and $350 GeForce GTX 470 graphics cards, both derived from the company's first DirectX 11-capable GPU, GF100. Tom's Hardware just posted a comprehensive look at the new cards, including their power requirements and performance attributes. Two GTX 480s in SLI seem to scale impressively well — providing you have $1,000 for graphics, a beefy power supply, and a case with lots of airflow."
Fermi needs a refresh or v2 (Score:5, Informative)
It seems like NVIDIA has fallen into the same trap as with GeForce 5XXX generation launch.
Re:Nvidia can only hope... (Score:5, Informative)
Prescott at its hottest (Pentium 4 HT 571) was only 115W, which is about the same or (in some cases) vastly less than nearly every mid-range to high-end GPU today.
Radeon 5830 is 175W
Radeon 5850 is 151W
Radeon 5770 is 108W
Prescott at its hottest actually used less power than some of the current high-end Core i7 CPUs (i7-920 is 130W), although of course that's comparing a 1-core CPU to a vastly faster 4-core CPU.
What's happened is that CPU coolers have gotten much better (thanks in part to heatpipes and larger fins/fans), power supplies have gotten more efficient and larger, and cases are better ventilated. The result is that today a 130W CPU is no big deal, whereas with the Prescott it caused all kinds of thermal nightmares for people building their own PCs (professionally engineered commercial PCs generally fared OK with Prescott).
Still, 250W on a GPU is stupid. Even with modern efficient air cooling, it's hard to keep such a GPU cool without making a ton of noise. Add the crazy power supply requirements (most people are recommending 550W or more, which means $100+ if you want a quality PSU), and it's a pretty big burden. The real problem is that the ATI card is almost as fast, cheaper, and 80 watts cooler. And it's been on the market for 8 months.
Anand Tech Review (Score:5, Informative)
In my own opinion, ATI still has a competitive advantage, especially considering that they can always drop their price if they feel threatened. nVidia is lucky that they have the ION and Tegra to fall back on, because it doesn't seems as though they don't have a pot to piss in right now in terms of high-end desktop graphics offerings. The 480 seems to be about equal to similarly priced ATI offerings and doesn't give them the edge in performance that they're accustomed to having.
Re:Nvidia can only hope... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:I'm really not impressed. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Fermi needs a refresh or v2 (Score:5, Informative)
That's overstating it WAY too much.
In certain benchmarks the GTX480 is quite a bit faster than the 5870, but what you're saying is that it is across the board, which is just not true. From the conclusion of the AnandTech review:
There is a massive difference between "10 to 15%" and "2x-10x faster".
90 degrees C, at Idle!! (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.legitreviews.com/article/1258/15/ [legitreviews.com]
I discovered that the GeForce GTX 480 video card was sitting at 90C in an idle state since I had two monitors installed on my system. I talked with some of the NVIDIA engineers about this 'issue' I was having and found that it wasn't really an issue per say as they do it to prevent screen flickering. This is what NVIDIA said in response to our questions:
"We are currently keeping memory clock high to avoid some screen flicker when changing power states, so for now we are running higher idle power in dual-screen setups. Not sure when/if this will be changed. Also note we're trading off temps for acoustic quality at idle. We could ratchet down the temp, but need to turn up the fan to do so. Our fan control is set to not start increasing fan until we're up near the 80's, so the higher temp is actually by design to keep the acoustics lower." - NVIDIA PR
Regardless what the reasons are behind this, running a two monitor setup will cause your system to literally bake.
Yikes!
I already wasn't impressed, but after reading this it looks more like a fiasco, than just a mild disappointment.
Re:Fermi needs a refresh or v2 (Score:3, Informative)
Re:I'm really not impressed. (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Anand Tech Review (Score:3, Informative)
http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=2062218 [anandtech.com] have some info about it... Or rather, a lot of people reporting the same, and nothing from the site admins.