Buying GTX 480 / 470? Post Review poll

[Taskforce]

Almost a year late to the game, heat, power and price, i'm not even tempted one bit, i'm a AMD hater but admittedly the grass looks a lot greener on their side.

[Rattle]

Pass

[Sushi Warrior]

There's no "maybe" option.... I think I fit in that category best.

[Penryn]

Gtx 4** Series Bad Cards.

[MrDiaz]

As most of the people in here I ain't buying nVidia this time around either. Very dissappointed with the results I've seen, waiting on new ATI's refresh now. Hopefully by Q4 2010

[Frag Maniac]

Nowhere in there was an option for those of us considering waiting out another die shrink. Seems to me Fermi would have been much better suited to a 32nm process. So while I like the features and performance is OK for the price charged, a 200 TDP or less would have been much more acceptable and may not have required noise cancelling headphones just to play with the fan at 100%. Seems Nvidia needs help from those die shrinking wizards at Intel. To bad they make poor bedfellows.

[H2O]

I'm skipping this round also (for now). My current build will probably use CF HD5850s or 2GB HD5870s. Maybe if I ever have the case and cooling capacity to handle the GTX480 (think MM case with 3x 360 rads), I'll pull the trigger on 2 or 3 GTX480s/485s.

[GTSRboy]

i Currently have a GTX 285, i see no reason at all to upgrade. All my games, including Crysis on Very high run smooth as butter...and IF i need something faster, i still have a second GPU slot. Seems like GPUs are moving faster than the gaming industry

[doxology83]

i Currently have a GTX 285, i see no reason at all to upgrade. All my games, including Crysis on Very high run smooth as butter...and IF i need something faster, i still have a second GPU slot. Seems like GPUs are moving faster than the gaming industry

it seems that way to me a lot of times. i upgraded my little brothers computer and bought an ati 4650 for $50 on newegg with 512mb of DDR3 ram and was blown away at what that little $50 video card could do. I have never spent over $200 for a video card for myself. I guess I am more of a bang for buck kind of guy. I would rather save $150 and miss out on those 3 frames per second. I am being sarcastic but it often feels that way.

one of the things that surprised me after reading more reviews of these nvidia cards is that the ati cards actually do better against the nvidia cards at higher resolutions. the main reason i have often found these days for the more expensive gpu's is that they run the high end games better at higher resolutions. it is the main reason to me that these new cards seem way overpriced especially if you are running the really high resolutions.

[Nomadsoul]

I have pulled the trigger, to satisfy my curiosity !

[BobyTT]

I have pulled the trigger, to satisfy my curiosity !

Are u live in US? From where did u ordered the card?

[Alien Grey]

I voted not buying after seeing the reviews. The performance/powerconsumption is really bad. These cards aren't worth the money.

I already new that when I saw the first pictures of a GTX 480 it was just waiting for the reviews to confirm it.

[R_1]

Already bought HD5870 six months ago for 380$. So, will skip GF100. It is lot more expensive, power hungry and noisy for my liking.

[ajaidev]

GTX 480 is too expensive, GTX 470 looks good only when OCed but then again it will get hotter and eat more.

So the real options are 5870 2gb and GTX 470 factory overclocked "If its not very hot or hungry"

[Andrea deluxe]

from hardware canucks:

In our tests, thermal throttling usually set in at around 105°C on the GF100 cards while complete thermal shutdown happens around 112-125°C


is real???

[R_1]

Don't know, but my guess is that Nvidia driver will cause Windows TDR event before GPU starts to throttle. Those temps are not linear and gradient. You can get 10 or more °C jump in a split second, when GPU is rising load from 30 to 99% and your monitoring software won't even register it. What you will get is only a message "Driver stopped responding and was successfully recovered". So, no need for high overclocking hopes before real tests with retail cards appears.

[ajaidev]

GTX 480 is too expensive, GTX 470 looks good only when OCed but then again it will get hotter and eat more.

So the real options are 5870 2gb and GTX 470 factory overclocked "If its not very hot or hungry"

scratch that going with 5870 2GB, i was told that the factory OCed GTX 470 will not be by much and will carry a power increase so its what i did not want. On top of that they will use the stock heat sink for the OCed model how retarded is that.

I am getting either of the follow depending on several factors :

Asrock X58 Extreme3
Intel i7 930
3GB DDR3 kit "G.Skill"
2*500GB hdd "dual RAID0 arrays"
2*5870 2GB

or

Asrock 890GX Extreme3
AMD 1055T
2*2GB DDR3 kit "OCZ"
2*500GB hdd "dual RAID0 arrays"
2*5870 2GB

[audioave10]

I'm just keeping my GTX 260 & GTX 275 for now. I'd like a 470 but like others
here, I'd wait for a die shrink. This makes the 5850 more tempting.

[pr@$r1g]

scratch that going with 5870 2GB, i was told that the factory OCed GTX 470 will not be by much and will carry a power increase so its what i did not want. On top of that they will use the stock heat sink for the OCed model how retarded is that.

I am getting either of the follow depending on several factors :

Asrock X58 Extreme3
Intel i7 930
3GB DDR3 kit "G.Skill"
2*500GB hdd "dual RAID0 arrays"
2*5870 2GB

or

Asrock 890GX Extreme3
AMD 1055T
2*2GB DDR3 kit "OCZ"
2*500GB hdd "dual RAID0 arrays"
2*5870 2GB

that's what i was thinking ,GTX 4xx's are power hogs ... 5870 2gb can do away with that ...

But hey anything new , im also interested in buying one ... ,i will wait for the market to be spiced UP^

Any reason on choosing this > Asrock X58 Extreme3 ???

[Blacklash]

Getting a second 5870 to go with the one I already own instead.

GTX 480 SLi is solid and I don't feel like spending 1k on it.

[ajaidev]

that's what i was thinking ,GTX 4xx's are power hogs ... 5870 2gb can do away with that ...

But hey anything new , im also interested in buying one ... ,i will wait for the market to be spiced UP^

Any reason on choosing this > Asrock X58 Extreme3 ???

Well it has USB 3.0 and SATA3 6.0 Gb/s and is available in India for pre order

Its not very expensive also, i looked at Biostar x58 from local shop it was for Rs.17000

Oh ya did you sell your 9400/9500 on techenclave?

[bfar]

Normally get the next-gen Nvidia cards at launch, but not this time. Performance is there, but price is too high, and heat/power consumption really put me off.

[Frag Maniac]

from hardware canucks:

In our tests, thermal throttling usually set in at around 105°C on the GF100 cards while complete thermal shutdown happens around 112-125°C


is real???

Mark at Bjorn3D confirms the throttling at 105c. Don't know about the actual shut down temp, but if it throttles down at 105c, you're likely never going to experience shut down if it takes 112c or more to happen. He's also one of the only ones having done a separate tesselation test AND tested with a bump in chipset voltage, which he said improved performance a bit. He's got a few more tests to run, but his benches on those he did run show a bit better result for the 480 over the 5870. Note that Mark is wary of the temps too though and doesn't recommend extended folding with a 480 without aftermarket cooling.

Two sites also confirm that bumping fan speed from the stock 60% to 70% yields a much more acceptable 80c load temp vs 95c while staying within reasonable noise levels (Guru3D & OverclockersClub). Also a nod to TechPowerUp for their excellent Pci-Ex scaling review on the GTX 480. I really wanted to know by what margin the GTX 480 would exceed an 8x Pci-Ex slot. Turns out it's exactly that of a 5870, exceeding it by a mere 2%. The example they gave is 63.2 FPS vs. 62.1 FPS, at 2560 x 1600 in DiRT 2. A mere 1 frame drop on 8x.

So despite the 480 requiring a fair bit of power and putting out a lot of heat, it isn't any more bandwidth hungry than a 5870, yet averages around 18% better performance at 1920x1200. It can do quite well on the P55 chipset, and may in some ways be better suited there considering there's more room on a P55 board to separate cards in SLI and less heat due to no northbridge chip.

So it's not all that bad, I'd just like to see a more thermally efficient chip. Imagine if you so much as have a cable stuffed in the back of your MB compartment somehow spring forward and touch the 480 heatpipes. "Hmmm, what's that nasty smell?...OMG, my PC is on fire!" Needless to say careful cable management is a must. The guys at Bjorn are saying a 32nm version may come late fall to early winter time frame. So I may gamble come July on a lower priced EVGA card to get me by (275 or something), in hopes to make use of their upgrade program to the 32nm GPU.

[pr@$r1g]

I guess " 32nm's GPU's are for 2011 summer time frame " or may be 28nm

Hell yeah reviews @ TPU are awesome I never miss a article !!!

[LiquidReactor]

I have no reason to jump ATM even for folding. My GTX 285 SLI is somewhere inbetween HD 5970 - HD 5870 CF and I have no DX 11 itch. Maybe if nVidia releases a Fermi revision with 512 cores and drastically ramped up core speeds I'll consider it but otherwise no.