The Fermi Thread - Part 3

[***Deimos***]

http://hwbot.org/hardware/videocard/geforce_gtx_480

An unvoltmodded 800 MHz stable on air is quite nice for an Nvidia card, no doing that on a GTX285.

1165 MHz and 30K vantage under LN2 is also very nice, I'd like to see some more results with a overclocked CPU.

nVidia was stuck in a narrow 75Mhz zone, between 574Mhz - 651Mhz, for many years. (From 7900 GTX, to 8800 GTX, 8800 ULTRA, 9800 GTX, GTX280 all the way up to GTX285).

Until a couple days ago the only exception was 9800GTX+/GTS250. Even the 40nm GT240 clocks in at meagre 550Mhz.

On air, 800. With better cooling 900. Perhaps they use higher voltage than necessary to compensate for TSMC channel length variance. They could use various tricks around it, and TMSC could improve. With tighter control and reduced voltage near 200W might be possible (at expence of little OC headroom). But, with this 6 month delya, what if they already used up this "4890" trick?

@TweakTown review. how does a 10% overclock get 30% performance boost on HAWX?

Dunno. But they aren't just changing core clock - mem too.

Am I the only person who wants to see more GTX 295 Vs GTX 480 comparisons?
The GTX 480 is a strange card, yes it is rather powerful and certainly not an Epic fail

At launch I recall, GTX280 was < 9800GX2. In contrast, Fermi is consistently > GTX295. Performance, especially DX11, (in my mind) is outstanding.

The *only* problem with Fermi is power/heat. If they "fixed" it before maybe they can do it again:
GTX280 600Mhz 230W "close" to 250W Fermi - really more like 300W.
GTX285 650Mhz 180W

5870 scales poorly with clocks. At 950 or even 1000Mhz, it wont make up Fermi's 25-30% lead in DX11+AA. So a 200W, 750-800Mhz "GTX485", would just extend that lead.

Problem with GTX280 analogy is that 55nm was available and used by AMD for 1.5 years... 40nm is already the half-node shrink of 45nm.