Conclusion
The big day has come, but with the review it has also passed. NVIDIA GeForce GTX 480 is finally here after an all too long wait, and maybe our expectations were too high, but we’re just going to say it: we wanted more. The price is sky-high, over $500 in stores, availability will be close to zero and nothing, power consumption and heat development is way too high to make it practical, for example inside a case. On the other hand DirectX 11 benchmarks showed that the performance is there and it outmatched competitor Radeon HD 5870, but the question is if not HD 5970 is a better choice of competition to GTX 480 than the single-GPU baby brother. Okay, HD 5970 is $80-90 more expensive than GTX 480, but it also whips the NVIDIA creation pretty badly overall. The disadvantage is even higher power consumption under load, but also better performance. If you’re seriously considering a GTX 480 you should really think about getting HD 5970 instead.
If we’re took look at things from the bright side, the card performs well if you don’t consider performance per buck or performance per watt. The card scales well with overclocking, which makes it a very interesting candidate for liquid nitrogen action, which will happen in the near future. The prices will drop as the cards appear in greater masses, and maybe in a few months GeForce GTX 480 will benefit us consumers with lower prices that will eventually result in a price war. We haven’t mentioned the cooler, more than it is relatively sturdy, which is needed to remove 250W heat. When the GF100 cores heats up the fan spins up to keep the temperature down. The problem is that GTX 480 is in no way gracious about it. It is simply very loud.
The performance is in no way a failure, worst case scenario it is just below the factory overclocked HD 5870 card, best case scenario it is up fighting with HD 5970, which has to be considered a feat with a new graphics card and early drivers. The situation is very similar to GeForce GTX 280 – it’s new, it’s hot and it performs well, but it could have been so much better. As G200b replaced GTX 285, we hope to see GF100b as soon as possible.
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NVIDIA GeForce GTX 480
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Pros:
+ DirectX 11 performance + Finally here + Relatively small Cons: |
We want to thank NVIDIA for supplying a GeForce GTX 480 for evaluation.
