Hi All, I was one of the lucky ones who got one of these 480's I must admit, i was very impressed with this card. I came from a 4050 so the jump was rather large. I noticed the inevitable frame rate boost and now i play all games at maximum settings! yay! As I was expecting a loud card, I wasn't surprised at how noisy it is. It's not too bad and as I wear headphones when gaming so i don't really notice. Although I could image that 3 of these close together would drive me a bit crazy!! I have tried this card in 2 different cases. It was originally in a HAF 912 with a large side fan blowing on the card. I have now got it in a ATSC 840 with no side fan and TBH this only made a difference of a couple of degrees using the standard profile. As of yet, i haven't overclocked the card at all as its nice and quick. I am planning to move on to water cooling over the next couple of weeks so I will try then. As for cons of this card. Well for some crazy reason, the mini hdmi to full size hdmi adaptor supplied with this card doesn't fit. Well it fits the port but it's too wide and hits the pci bracket!! I can't believe that no one at zotec noticed this! not to worry, i ended up getting a dvi to hdmi cable which has done the trick. Finally, i would like to say that this was the best thing i have bought from the forums and dealing with Pete was a pleasure. The card was like new with original packaging and delivered on time. So guys, if you see him selling anything else, buy it
Pete, how's your 580 overclocking coming along? managing 900MHz with 1.088v. have not tryed vRAM, don't know if it'd make any difference. to be honest, i don't think i'll keep the overclock, just playing around due to new hardware, it's already fast enough. using EVGA OC Scanner to test (seems to be free from throttling), then use Crysis playthrough for longer in-game stability test.
To be honest, the overclocking's gone a bit...weird. When I first had a go with the new drivers, I managed to get 870MHz that night on 1.075V. The Heaven benchmark reached an average of ~65FPS and seemed to be free of artifacts. I got greedy and whacked the cards up to 1.185V (the maximum Afterburner allows) and got it up to 890 - 900 crashed. Anyway, I set the Heaven Benchmark going the next morning to do a stability check; within a few seconds it had crashed! I got it stable again at 1.1V (I didn't want to go higher) but there were artifacts all over the Heaven benchmark (it still completed 2 hours of stability testing though). I also noticed that the cards seemed to throttle back to stock after one benchmark, presumably as I was hitting the temperature limit (97-98C) even with the fan at full. After some further tinkering, I found that at 1.05V the cards stayed at normal temperatures and were far quieter as a result (the default fan profile seems to be quite good). At this voltage, the cards could work at 830MHz but artifacts were everywhere. I've put them to 810 for now. I might reinstall the drivers at some point and see if that improves things (I reckon crashing the cards at 1.185V and 900 core has buggered things slightly) but it's proving difficult to reliably test stability. My long time favourite testing software, OCCT, doesn't seem to be a good indication of testing anymore, probably due to the power throttling of the cards. I was also working on my PhD this weekend, running FEA on my machine, so I couldn't play around more with overclocking. Luckily my rig's so awesome I could play games while the FEA ran in the background .
i think you are limited by your card temperature on that setup. not enough airflow to the cards? watercool them during my overclocking last night, my apartment was freezing due to me being away for the whole weekend, and i've turned off central heating. the card (with minor tweaked fan profile), never went above 75c. i've read somewhere that at about 97c, the GPU will be throttled back, perhaps the stock-speed-after-one-benchmark issue you are seeing is due to this?
I'd love to but I really don't have the funds now. Temperatures are definitely limiting them, but hey. Still, I'm much happier with my mild overclock - the noise is much, much less than my 480s were. Currently I'm playing Alien Breed 3 and my cards barely make any noise during. @DeathAwaitsU: I assume you're not asking a rhetorical question That is a liquid nitrogen cooled 480, with an additional power circuit from another 480. It's probably how someone managed to reach 1400MHz core!
Dunno if you mistyped but it's a 580 with a 480 strapped to it you tried using gpu-z to disable the 580 from throttling ? http://www.techpowerup.com/134460/Disable-GeForce-GTX-580-Power-Throttling-using-GPU-Z.html
I haven't, but the TIM application on the 580 is supposed to be quite good. It's the closeness of the cards that is the overpowering problem - the bottom card is at ~75 whilst the top card is at ~91 at current settings! It wasn't a typo but I've only just noticed that you are right! Jaysus, that's mental. As for disabling the throttling, most places I've looked at have concluded that unless you're massively overvolting the cards (and I mean far beyond 1.2V) it won't affect overclocking.
disabling throttling will only hurt your investment. don't do it unless you've got full waterblock covering the card's every component. how do you see the difference between 480 and 580?
Some people are absolutely mental lol, i gathered it was liquid nitrogen but the half a card made me wtf, it's crazy what some people think of to get more power.
