Hardware Nvidia GeForce GTX 480 1,536MB Review

soldering iron are at 300c and they hardly melt the very cheap PCB's (think ordering single one-off for £50 at PCBtrain). so i'd say nVidia multi-layered PCB can withstand more than 300c no problem.

5870 are found to have spaces for extra power phase and 8+6 pin PCIe power connector spacing. so it is very likely when chip production picks up.

about Dirt 2 and STALKER, is the card's thermal performance not bad enough? why keep picking holes in this product?

i can't wait for Bit-tech's architecture in-depth look, im sure there's a reason for it being so hot/power nom nom.

 

Its not bad enough if the "good" or "decent" results are achieved by excluding information or cheating the consumer out of something that they expect from a $500 product, and it's worse when a Tech Journalist gives them a bye and lets the product look better than it is.

 

thats pretty disappointing considering all the hype that was being thrown around.

 

No need, everything is explained on semiaccurate. As much as you should take anything Charlie says with a grain of salt (or a handful), he has been pretty spot on about everything Fermi related for months. In nVidia's defence, it wasn't all their fault, but they made some stupid decisions, attempted to fix some problems with the wrong approach, and at the end of the day I don't think their monolithic GPU strategy is such a good one.

 

The short Version of what Charlie has been saying for the past few months is that the combination of TSMC's 40nm process (which is rife with trouble, as the 4770 was born just as a test article for this process) and the massive die Fermi has made it extremely difficult to manufacture, even with two respins (re-working the metal layers of the chip). ATI engineered around the problem with the 5xxx series, while Nvidia largely whined about TSMC's inadequacy and brute forced their chip to functionality by cranking up the voltage to make the transistors switch. Add in the inevitable defects present in a 529mm square die and Fermi is the cut down result that we have today over what the chip was supposed to be.

 

Nvidia released a new card and all I saw was a hot running power hungry overpriced 5870 yawn.....

Are we sure its not another 8800 rebadge? C'mon Nvida, we waited this long to be let down, you could have done this to us six months ago and played the underdog and not the snob. I'm not a fanboy but your recent behavior, both rebadging and exorbitant prices, do nothing but justify buying ATI. I know the 480 SLI is pretty good but for a 1000! Ok what can it do with CUDA?

The tides have turned again. I do hope Nvidia can get their act together, competition is good for us in lower prices. If I had the money today a 5850 Cross Fire looks very reasonable. Maybe now game programmers will stop stacking the decks against ATI. (ref. Batman et. all) I know, wishful thinking.

 

programmers didnt stack against ATI, they were paid, I mean funded to lol. Either way ATI is certainly maintaining the crown, which is good, it will get their budget up for more R&D and so on so this is all good in the long run.

 

You'd melt a hole right through your motherboard and case if you even try and put 2 of these furnaces near each other as well as using half the electricity needed to power Manhattan

 

As far as I know Dirt2 was edited with the ini file directly not changed settings within the game, but I'll leave the guys to answer.

STALKER doesn't allow AA or whatever because some technical reason I always forget, so the guys don't do it. Instead they ramped every option to the fullest so it looks as good as it can possibly get.

 

We'll be doing some testing on Monday to confirmm but if so we'll obviously make corrections. We tested by editting the .ini file of the hardware settings, explicitly forcing the Direct X version to 11. If the game has not recognised these new cards and defaulted to DX9, we'll obviously be retesting and will likely add a follow up article.

Insofar as STALKER numbers - historically we've never tested STALKER with AA - just look back through the last year or so of graphics reviews. AA has typically killed performance in this game and was massively optimised for ATI hardware iirc, so we chose to review without - the 0xAA number speak for themselves though.

 

4GB of VRAM on a dual GPU card actually means you have 2GB effective. I'm running a 2560*1600 resolution (ignoring my secondary monitor, which I use when playing supreme Commander) and I like having anisotropic filtering at 16x and anti-aliasing at 8x or more. Quite a few games (e.g. UT3, Mass Effect) actually end up pushing GPUs with =<1GB and the framerate drops from 60+ to <20 when switching from 4x to 8x anti-aliasing.

 

How about an overclock comparison between 5870 and 480?

 

Overclocking the 480
Overclocking the 5870

 

5850 CF here I come!

 

You can probably use the exposed section of the heatsink on the GTX480 as a cigarette lighter when it's overclocked -.-'

 

I feel justified with my purchase of a 5850. I bought it and woke up to find out that fermi was out and reviewed. Doesn't look like I'm missing much. Reminds me of the Fx years, performance is alright but not at that thermal load and wattage.

 

All this bad press. Just remember what the ATI 2xxx was like when if first came out and look at it now. Given i was hoping from more from Nvidia how will this architecture fair with age maybe 18 months down the line, a die shrink or when the 40nm process is nailed will this card show its true colours.

But for now i still have no reason to upgrade my CF 4870's....... Dam

 

How disappointing.

Do you think we could get a Fermi based podcast with the Bit guys sounding off with their thoughts about the card and Nvidia in general? A few months ago Tim made some very interesting observations on the hardware podcast about Nvidia's increasing apathy in regards to the high-end graphics card market and their greater focus on embedded and mobile platforms.

Would be interesting to hear more thoughts now that the NDA is lifted and Fermi has been benchmarked.

 

i wonder how 3rd party non-reference cards will be.

 

Nah, plenty of room and a perfect platform to fry a good sized steak.