GTX480 / GTX470 Reviews and Discussion

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I dont think a simple Driver update would lower the power consumption by 100W or lower Core temp by 20-30C. Its more a Physical ,Engineering problem since the Fermi design beginning and not that easy to reverse. nVidia should finally learn efficiency lessons from ATi, it had to come to an ugly end, they kept increasing the die size and adding more ram, thank god they didnt use 512bit Bus, power consumption would be much higher than that if they have not disabled 32SPs and lowered the clocks. I am not willing to pay 10-20$/ Day on power bill just for gaming, no thanks.

EDIT: thanks to notty for calculating the power draw cost / year = 135$ if you play 4Hour/Day, thats a LOT more in Europ lmao
 
I did some calculations based on the Fermi review from Tom's Hardware for the overall performance between Nvidia and ATI cards with and without Antialiasing. (1920x1200 used for 4xAA and 2560x1600 used for 0xAA as the two setting provide similar framerates. Metro 2033 not included. ATI 5850 is taken as a base).

2560x1600(No AA)

ATI 5970 - 183.35
GTX 480 - 129.36
ATI 5870 - 126.29
GTX 470 - 99.43
ATI 5850 - 100.00

Without AA, Fermi cards look disappointing. GTX 480 is only marginally faster than 5870 wheras GTX 470 is on the same level of 5850.

1920X1200 (4XAA)


ATI 5970 - 169.90
GTX 480 - 138.02
ATI 5870 - 114.70
GTX 470 - 110.96
ATI 5850 - 100.00

But when AA is applied, we have a completely different scenario. Now the 480 is 20% faster than 5870 and 470 is 10% faster than 5850. In fact 5870 and 470 are pretty close.

If further antialiasing is applied, the gain by nvidia cards will only increase.
 
I dont think a simple Driver update would lower the power consumption by 100W or lower Core temp by 20-30C. Its more a Physical ,Engineering problem since the Fermi design beginning and not that easy to reverse. nVidia should finally learn efficiency lessons from ATi, it had to come to an ugly end, they kept increasing the die size and adding more ram, thank god they didnt use 512bit Bus, power consumption would be much higher than that if they have not disabled 32SPs and lowered the clocks. I am not willing to pay 10-20$/ Day on power bill just for gaming, no thanks.
Click to expand...

You better use some of that money your spending on gaming for your education :).
Its not going to cost your 10 or 20 dollars a day, even in fantasy land.
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http://michaelbluejay.com/electricity/howmuch.html
:)
 


LOL I didnt calculate it but my point still here 😉 I was just waiting on som1 to jump in and calculate as I was too lazy LOL

Thanks :sol:
 
I remember reading somwhere about the Asus Mars costing 2$/Hour of gaming in power bill in Europe.

hmm NY rate is 18c, considering 10hour of gaming / day, its 505$/Year, but hey, Fermi SLI cannot be run on a 750w psu so its more? lol

Dam, cant find any 5870 Lightning in Canada sigh, are those limited? They run 1Ghz@1.16v-1385Ram and warranted up to 1.35v.
 
I personally am not 100% disappointed in Nvidia, but I'm quite disappointed. Fortunately we aren't paying a thousand dollars for Tesla with two GTX 260s running in SLI. Unfortunately for gamers such as myself, they failed us by having them run on nuclear reactors with 200 db fans that breathes out fire. I expected the GTX 480 to be as fast as two GTX 285s, but it's only in the GPGPU.

ATi is also creating Northern Islands to combat against Fermi and it include better Tessellation acceleration, 3D (maybe), GPGPU and 32x CsAA all in one graphics card that cost less than $400, runs on 2 rechargeable Energizer batteries and PCI slots while providing A/C for our cases. (sarcasm)
 
I'm still hopeful considering the 480 has disabled cores and the 470 has disabled cores i'm looking forward to nvidia's refresh or next gen + die shrink, just when they can get the yields good enough to sell a full chip. The arch was probably just a year earily but nvidia still benefits from being able to use this for years to come.

I wont be buying a 480 or 470 esp a 470 lol it's price doesn't justify it's performance and features at all.

Can't wait till the rumors on the refresh start~ lol
 
just want to say to maziar:

was it really necessary to lock our 8 page discussion just because there are other threads about fermi? i understand there are alot of them springing up, but many of us were mid-conversation (very long conversations) and thats very annoying to have a thread locked like that.
 
Yes it was because we were having many threads with actually one subject,but since this wan is stickied and has all of the review links,i decided to keep the discussion in one place.
You can discuss all the things you want here,its not good to have 4-5 topics in a forum with one subject,gathering them in on thread will make users find the reviews more easily and in one place
 
GTX 480 + intel pentium 4 Prescott = one really good space heater. :lol:

Anyways, yeah i hope future fermi cards get redone to have lower power consumption and temp. although that probably wont happen for a little while. Single gpu taking just as much power as a dual gpu is crazy!
 
I reviewed some of the sites and I have a lot of things to talk about :). First to say I am somewhat more pleasantly surprised than unpleasantly however the whole things is kinda mixed feelings :)

Oh boy where do I start. Lets start with the good things.

1. AA performance is IMPROVED. We see almost identical drops in % perf as ATI cards , so we have a bravo here for Fermi

2. Fermi is MUCH MORE future proof than ATI at the moment. Heave tesselation and compute power will probably guarrantee you much longer life (if card dont burn up :) ). This is one of the main factors probably buyers will consider. We can see how Fermi wins in newer games , like Metro, JustCause 2, Unigine heavy tesselation, etc.

The thing is that people shouldnt care too much about older games because in the matter of facts who cares if his Call of Duty 5 runs 140fps or 120. I would much more care if my future game runs 30fps than 20fps. Fermi wins here, sometimes impressively

3. Fermi seems to scale much better. I cant even figure out why exactly. By theoreticaly difference between 5850/5870 and 470/480 should be almost exact, but you see how 480 have bigger lead over 470 than 5870 over 5850.
This could mean that a 725-750Mhz 512 core card will be a BEAST (probably what nVidia aimed but missed)

4. Idle power consumption is somewhat OK. For such a HUGE chip its really only 20-30W more on idle.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Thats about all about good stuff. Lets start with bad stuff
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

5. Fermi future seems to depend SOLELY on the developers will to move in its direction. Thats a risky move and even if they decide to move in that direction that means probably 2year gap between we see utilisation of Fermi and by that time there will be 2 new generations from ATI/nVidia so Future proofing is not as much important as it seems

6. Current performance is not good enogh. Everybody who cares about current titles, present time will not lean to Fermi probably. Actually ATI can KEEP current prices and still sell same. WHICH SUCKS.

7. POWER CONSUMPTION- If I had bigger letters I would have used them. Power consumption under load is ridiculous. Its just not practical. Thats the biggest problem on Fermi by my opinion. Not because people care too much, its because currently companies are restrained mostly by power limits and perf/watt. This trips nVidia in its future as they have more inefficient chip which makes it harder to compete in the future. They hit the current power wall and that will make it HARD to improve from now on. Ati however have headroom and can sway left / right or up/down.

Another thing I want to point is that I THINK nVidia lied about the power consumption. There are reviews where 480GTX draws 10-30W MORE than 5970!!!!!! ARE YOU KIDDING ME. 5970 is 294W this puts 480 OVER 300W limit. I am not sure how that is possible but someone should make some more elaborate tests and measure the direct draw from the card itself.

It could be 480 just loads the cpu more and thus drawing more watts overal but I dont think it can be in such a big degree. reviews show 120-150W OVER 5870. Thats just SICK.

8. Temperatures and noise. Nobody likes the noise. Some people are more tollerable some are not but overal, this is the noisiest card around even outpassing dual cards. Lot of users will turn around just because of that.

9. Price - To be honest $499 seems fair price for Fermi. However it seems fair only because of the situation. Ati released 5870 at $379 and now its $420, 5850 was $259 and now its over $300. Ati can bring down the prices and then nVidia will suffer, so they are kinda left out to ATI will here. Good thing for nVidia is that ATI wont drop prices until demand is more than supply. But that will probably change in 3-6 months. Manufacturing cost for that card is MUCH bigger than 5870 so in the long run nVidia pricing doesnt look good.

10. No Fermi Mainstream/Performance cards yet, and there will not be any until probably July/August. Too little too late. Ati is expected to release 6000 series at the end of the year. And by that time all nVidia will have left are some HUGE chips which it needs to sell cheap. By end of the year GTX 260-280 will be mainstream chips costing probably between $120-180 - and these are HUGE chips. nVidia must come with some miracle here to be able to stay in all price markets.

Overall its such a mixed feeling. Fermi drives the technology ahead and could possible bring us some goodies in the long run and increase progress speed. However as all new/strange/odd approaches its steep price will slow its distribution.

Until most of the people have this new technology will pass probably 2-3 years.
Remember when nvidia 8000 and ati 2000 series came out? Dx10 was on the table then and its been over 3 years. Now we can say MOST of the games have dx10 cards. Now it will be safe for a developer to develop solely dx10-11 game. NOT until now.

Please comment :)
 
I think the most important improvements in fermi are the new 32X AA and better DX11 tesselation

And i think GTX470 is way more worth it for the money than a GTX480. GTX470 is 50$ more than HD5850 and it comes with all those features that come with 480, it just has 448 cores and 1.28GB DDR5 instead of 480 (512 actually, we'll see if that GTX480 version will come out) and 1.5GB. It ain't that much of a slowdown😉

GTX480 just ain't wort the 100$ premium over 5870

The min. requirements for 470 is 550W PSU and 600W for 480 (though i think you should have 600W for 470 and 650W for 480:))
 
the only reason to get this is if your into CUDA.... for renderers that support cuda it will be fast as fk.... ati needs some thing like cuda
 


+1

Besides CUDA, it'll be good they implement something like PhysX, though is not that important
 


And the fact it sounds like a space rocket taking off, you'd damage your ears levelling the volume just to cover the noise of those cards.
 
One question I have is, if I buy the vapor-x 5870, which is 15-20 C cooler then the reference card, which is cooler then the 480.

What would I expect from OCing in terms of comparing it to a 480?
 
In the guru3D site, the cards go to 95 Degrees 100% stress on stock fan settings, and 45 Degrees Idle (C).

I'm sure you can help solve that problem with upping the fan a bit.

As for the drivers Comment, what I meant was performance wise, not heat levels.

I am 100% confident that we'll see alot of ppl having them. Alot of ppl use to do the same thing during the ATI hate, yet they still bought the cards.
 
Sure drivers will improve performence but to a certain degree(ATi could also squeeze more fps through drivers update too) seeing those are not in the store yet as for the 95C it was done at between 72-80% Fanspeed stated by reviewers http://www.hardocp.com/article/2010/03/26/nvidia_fermi_gtx_470_480_sli_review/7.NOTE:The fan would increase by itself to near 80% when GPU temps rechs the 90s. Its low clockrate is the reason it is slow and nVidia were aiming for a 800Mhz Core and more than 4Ghz ram, though that will still be slower than a 5970 while consuming even 100w more than the highest Dual-GPU card which will break the 300w.They already have thermal problems, in my opinion, they need to make the die size smaller and thats not possible atm or in the near future at least, 1 year min before Fermi becomes what we hoped for beating the 5870 by the claimed 30-50% and becoming just a bit under the 5970 speed,I expect in 1 year a Dual-Fermi if its doable, even maybe more than 1 year actually as some people pointed out, it will be a bad year for video cards. From a gaming and efficiency point, the 480 is weak compared to competeition.

Quote from HardOC : <<We did see this, and it very much worth mentioning. With a nicely overclocked Core i7 920 processor (3.6GHz) and GTX 480 SLI, we saw at the wall wattages exceed 900 watts at the wall in some very stressful GPU system situation.>> Those 480s are running Stock speeds not even OCd yet, and running on a 87% efficiency PSU, so at 80% eff. as most good PSUs are, the load at the wall would be around 950w, so a 1Kw PSU is a must for a high end system. And if your going to OC those 480, I think a 1Kw would not even cut it anymore, more like 1.2Kw PSUs and no Im not joking lol

But thats not to say do not purchase one, sure new toys are welcome to play with but Im sure people will sell the 480 in 3 months if a 5970 4Gb OC hit the stores.(Sapphire 5970 4GB 850/1250 that will be crazy) or a 5890. I hope you show us some OC when you get the card 😀
 
Just wanting some real game/power consumption/heat benchmarks instead of furmark's all over the place. We know that furmark will get any card hot in the biscuit and so far, after reading 6 reviews, still not seeing any direct furmark performance comparisons.
 


Here we go:

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Source: http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=3783&p=19
 
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