The poll seems to disagree with a lot of the comments though! Can a 480 be run safely on a 3.5 year old, 620W PSU? It is a Corsair HX620W. The rest of the system is nothing special (E8400, Asus P5K Premium, 2HDDs, 3 Fans, 4x1GB DDR2-800), although some leeway needs to be allowed for overclocking!
Yip, I now have my GTX480 running on my test bench and running beautifully. I am so glad I opted for this card with the EK water block (and backplate) it is a great bit of kit. I was wanting to get a GTX580 but this is more than adequate for my needs, cool & quiet
I would go 480 due to how much faster it is for the same cost - will last till the next gen cards get here
No problem at all. I have mine running on a two and a half year old Antec 650W with a dual 120" Rad and a single 120" Rad, 4 fans in all running plus a water pump 4GB DDR3 Ram and 1 HDD
Looks like it is going to be the 480 then, although the cooler dumps all of the air in the case which may be interesting with the 250mm sided fan. Now I'm pondering over what period of time a 570 becomes cheaper due to power efficiency... Oh well I guess I'll buy it and if it doesn't cooler as well as it could I can take that into account when I get a new case later this year Edit: I made the plunge, but being the idiot I am I missed the 17:00 deadline so will have to go game-less till Wednesday! I can partly blame my dad for messing around with my Scan account though
That was when it cost over £400 where as now it's <£200. Also, new drivers have made it run slightly cooler too with a tad better performance, so I hear.
Happy with my GTX560 MSI. Fast enough at 1920x1080 cool and quiet. Clocks easy to 1ghz with afterburner.
I have 2x GTX480's, so I may be biased but if you are prepaired to do some mods/cable managment to get better air flow, the 480s are great. they where the first of their kind, and there was some problems with the manufacturing, so the selection or binning techniques were compramised and a lot of failed gpus were made. But this means that the gpu's were tested more , and the chips that made it are only the best of the batch, ie they are all golden chips.
Bit tech is highly adverse to better performance for the £ at the cost of noise/heat. Look at there complete blanking of the existence of sli/Xfire. They'll choose the 560.
I keep having to reming myself that my 480 is going to be pre-OC'd and has a custom cooler after reading all of the negative 480 reviews around the internet! Lots of 560s seem to win in some tests, but this is usually compared to a stock 480 and the price premium for custom 480s is very small now. I can see how the higher clock speeds can give this result - do we know if the fp16 abilities affect games at all? Maybe someone can test by comparing a 480 to a 580 with them clocked the same.
It's impossible to subjectively compare the cards simply by running them at the same speeds. The 580 will still kick the 480's ass simply due to the later revision and better internal hardware on the GPU itself. Even if the two are clocked at the same speed. It's like comparing my GTS 250 to a GTX 285 (No. They are not the same chipset, peoples): They could be identical in speeds, but the 285 will out.
The point would be to see how these revisions impact performance with everything else held constant. Although I have just realised that none of the 500 series has the same amount of SMs and memory as a 400 series card, making a comparison impossible anyway >_<
