Nvidia GTX 480 3-Way SLI Tested Against Radeons

Page 3 - Seeking answers? Join the Tom's Hardware community: where nearly two million members share solutions and discuss the latest tech.
Toggle sidebar Toggle sidebar
Status
Not open for further replies.
Why does everyone assume the 480's have subpar performance? For a single GPU card it is the fastest. How is that subpar performance? I agree it does run to hot and consumes way to much power. Is that not what was wrong with the first generation ATI 2900XT??? and its performance was really subpar. This is the first gen. I wouldn't buy it but wait until they release all 512 of its cores and shrink into a smaller cooler package. Then ATI will be in big trouble.

[citation][nom]quicksilver98[/nom]I agree, but I think what most are getting at is that they don't care if its a Ford or Chevy etc. Just that there are a lot of major design flaws associated with the Fermi line. I think they should spend a bit more on R&D before releasing the Grillforce cards. Plain and simple-Runs HotConsumes massive powerSub Par PerformanceExpensive**Steps off soap box**[/citation]
 
Oh dear... I remember a few years back when "kilowatt" in PC hardware was a term used exclusively as a marketting badge for PC Power & Cooling's entirely gratuitous power supply. Now it's 2010, and we're seeing it actually USED as a measurement of TDP. I think I'm going to go take my 600w PSU and go cry in the corner now.
[citation][nom]caskachan[/nom]how te f do i edit messages?[/citation]
Right at the very top of the list of comments, and BENEATH the red button that says "Add your comment" is a link that says "view comments on the forums." It'll show all the comments in a forum/board-style format, which means if you're logged in, a couple of buttons will appear next to your post/comment: "Edit" and "quick edit."
 
[citation][nom]warezme[/nom]Why does everyone assume the 480's have subpar performance? For a single GPU card it is the fastest. How is that subpar performance? I agree it does run to hot and consumes way to much power. Is that not what was wrong with the first generation ATI 2900XT??? and its performance was really subpar. This is the first gen. I wouldn't buy it but wait until they release all 512 of its cores and shrink into a smaller cooler package. Then ATI will be in big trouble.[/citation]

Thats what you have to come up with as a reply? What about the 5700 Ultra huh?? Last time I checked Nvidia has a nasty track record of doing stuff like this.. GT200 series, FX5700 Ultra, and now Fermi. When I made my comments about R&D I was pointing out that they are 6 months back on ATI now and their offering is Subpar due to the given time they had to come up with it. Nvidia is a good company who strives to make good quality products. That being said, this was a flop for them and yes ATI and Nvidia have both had their flops.

For now ATI has the upper hand thats all. And when they release their next gen cards later this year they will probably pull even further ahead.
 
[citation][nom]JerseyFirefighter[/nom]1.21 kilowatts! Great Scott! lol[/citation]
A timeless movie and great reference.

In a not so funny turn, I wonder how much further we can go like this before we start running into problems where we need upgraded electrical service or a statement of "Quad SLI/Crossfire requires a 20 amp circuit" - as the standard 15 amp is insufficient.

What happened to the technology sector where efficiency was where everything was headed? More powerful, efficient, smaller in size, less heat - where did the smaller energy requirement go?
 
[citation][nom]dreamphantom_1977[/nom]I dunno. In the benchmarks they said the cards where CPU bottlenecked. And in most of the games that really stress the system, the gtx 480's smoked the other cards. Maybe price/peformance/power you loose out, but who would really buy 3 gtx 480's? Only those going for benchmark records. Which means that power and price really isn't a big deal for those people. I am running a single gtx 480, and it plays "all my games" butter smooth. Plus I don't have to add a nvidia card to do physx like the ati boys do. I'd like to see a power consumption review comparing an ati radeon with an add in physx card compared to a single nvidia card because then you would have the same capability. And thats what the comparison should be about right? If you are running an ati card then any physx games you are crippled in, so you can't really compare. Just my opinion though.[/citation]I have an nvidia card and i don't use physx in games due to lowered frame rate, and technically a radeon card can run physx too, but that`s propriety of nvidia, they strip you of that if you have an active ATI card in your PC even though you payed for your nvidia card and its features. How do you comment on that ? And till now i never heard any friend that bought an nvidia card because it has Physx, and i trully wish this physx thing will end up like Creative`s EAX implemented even in onboard sound cards.

[citation][nom]aryalanae[/nom]I'm going to wait for NVIDIA to react to the benchmark tests. I highly doubt they'll sit around while ATI cards still beat their new baby.[/citation]
React to what ? They didn`t even launched the cards on the market yet and you want a new revision to it ? They`ll proly rebrand this to GTX 5xx - 6xx series while lowering the manufacture process and activating the last core, but this will take 1 more year at least i belive.

And for the guys who don`t get it why ppl say Nvidia fail even though the GTX480 is the fastest single chip card "available" well let`s put it this way in this particular benchmark: Higher price over all, higher temperature overall, way more higher power requirements , thus making you buy a new PSU and this for a card wich performs 20% better or 20% worse than a Radeon setup, and this being at a 46% increase in power usage and 25% increase in price.

 
Ugh, I forgot to ask.. do they come with uranium enriched rods?
That is why Iran has been investing in Nuclear Power..... Ahmanajinedad has been planing on running these three fat boys in SLA. :)
 
NVIDIA's chipset is brand new. NVDA has the experience, expertise and intelligence to make the best chipsets available. All AMD/ATI does is copy what NVIDIA does and put more crap in it, like pipelines, faster ram, faster shaders etc etc. I have yet to have 1 machine (out of about the 35 here at work) that runs correctly with an ATI Display Driver... I have been around long enough and have enough experience with 3D Accelerators/GPU's to know that NVIDIA is top of the line. The rest are just playing house.
 

Mostly, it's an unfortunate "side-effect" of the high levels of competitiveness between companies. Moore's law means that hardware makers have to wait to cram in more transistors... So the only other way to scale up performance to beat their competitor is to jack up the clock speed. And while smaller fabrication processes CAN cut power consumption, it's nowhere near as fast. As a result, chips have gotten hotter over time; this can be readily seen over just the past decade, from where passive cooling was sufficient for both mainstream CPUs and GPUs, to requiring massive active coolers. (and now, water cooling has gone from being a very 'underground' mod to being commonplace for those who can afford it)

Also, the prospect of needing to upgrade the household circuitry to run a PC makes me flinch just thinking about it.


No, they mean once they buy out and refit all the fabs in the world to make Fermi. 😀


Actually, at this rate, I think that PhysX will simply wind up not being used by developers; last I knew, Havok held a dominant market share, particularly owing to better cross-platform compatability, as it works as well on both ATI and nVidia cards.


Well, it's also worth noting that ATI's about 8 years older than nVidia. They don't exactly "copy." They've definitely invented a lot of things on their own. They've also been plenty agressive at times at adoping things before nVidia, such as DirectX 10.1, and later 11, support. Similarly, extra features are invented by them, such as EyeFinity.

It's unfortunate to hear anyone having a lot of problems with getting their computers to work... Though I would note that simply because you had those issues, doesn't mean everyone else does. Personally, I've gotten about equal numbers of problems with both ATI and nVidia drivers.
 
Seriously i don't know what all the ati fanboys are bragging out

This benchmark showed one thing clearly: triple and quad GPU configurations are overkill because they are expensive and don't scale well. And yet still although the 5870 scales better in triple configuration the gtx 480 beats it in almost every single test, that added the fact that nvidia femmi drivers are have more room for improvement as they are in beta stage

Also proved that if you wanna go multi gpu configuration nvidia fermi is the way to go. Because it scales much better than the 5870 in dual crossfire, and performs better tan one 5970, and keeps up very well with s 5970 in crossfire and i some cases dual gtx 480 performs better depending of the AA and res. Not to forget dual 5970 scales terribly its 400$ more expensive than dual sli gtx 480


3 way sli gtx 480 vs 3 crossire 5970
The 5870 scales better in and only in triple crossfire configuration YET 3 way gtx 480 Beats it in almost every single test, the only test in which tripe 5870 wins are in amd/ati sponsored games (dirt 2/hawx) what a shock?. The only argument ati fanboys use in this thread is that 3 way sli consumes much ore power and produces more heat YET they fail to realize that anyone who is willing to spend 1500$(gtx 480)1200$(5870) on a triple gpu setup wont have no problems whatsoever with case ventilation nor power consumption


Conclusion
- triple and quad GPU configurations are very expensive, overkill and don't scale well, they are not worth the extra money

- For dual GPU configurations gtx 480 is the way to go, it performs/scales much better than the 5870 (even in ati sponsored games), and in most cases performs on par or very close to quad 5970 which costs 400$ more

- The gtx 480 is currently the fastest single gpu it performs overall 20% better than 5870, in some cases even 40% lead, it receives a lower performance hit when enabling 4x/8x/16x Anti Aliasing, and it has superb unmatched perfomance in dx 11 tessellation

- gtx 480 performance on physx games is superb which btw physx library of games is increasing



- Apart from gaming one of fermis architecture main purpose was GPGPU, it naively supports C++ language, and ray traced scenes, its a monster of parallel processing with a wide variety of existing CUDA applications. For oter thing that gaming nvidia is WAY ahead of ati in the GPGPU gaming, anyone who works on 3d creation, photoshop autocad etc will tell you nvidia is the way to go


Final note
I am not trying to impose my brand preference everyone its own preference, both card are great, i am just getting tired of people ignorantly bashing on nvidia fermi, and what surprised me the most is that this site is getting flooded with ati fanboys soon toms hardware will feel like the BIASED forums of semi accurate
 
AMD- The way it is meant to be played.

Toss those Fermi pieces of rubbish in the bin. Waste of good electricity..
 
[citation][nom]darraghcoy[/nom]AMD- The way it is meant to be played.Toss those Fermi pieces of rubbish in the bin. Waste of good electricity..[/citation]

I posted with well backed up info, and all you do is act like a child bashing on fermi
 
[citation][nom]tpi2007[/nom]So they got 3 GTX 480's heh ? That means the rest of the world won't have any left to play with heheheI would very much like to be informed what is the room temperature of a setup like that in the middle of summer! 937 watts... that could definitely fry an egg - it's called the "3-way SLI pan"[/citation]
Gives a new meaning to the "Brick Oven"! :)

 
[citation][nom]hebe[/nom]Actual value based on power draw is tough to determine over time, but I'd say it's probably not much of a concern if you can afford to assemble one of these massive gaming rigs to begin with.[/citation]

Who cares? All energy is eventually "lost" as heat. While I realize that many of Tom's readers are Americans, Canadians who generally live in a colder climate than most of the U.S.A. would not mind the extra heat in the winter. In the summer I can see that it would be a huge waste to have all that heat output, since people are probably paying extra money for air conditioning in their homes then.
 
[citation][nom]sandmanwn[/nom]No such thing as SLI compliant ram. Its just a catchy little marketing phrase for noobs to fall for and spend more money than is necessary for a similar piece of hardware.The only thing in your system that would need to be swapped out is the motherboard. Given the amount of money you would save by buying ATI cards, you could buy a new motherboard combo at many places and probably come out at the same price.[/citation]

Why would he even be worried about the $50/ea price difference in cards or a motherboard if looking at such a solution to begin with? Most of these comments about price hit me like someone saying "I'd buy that Ferrari but I can't afford to change the oil, so I don't know what to do!"

 
Status
Not open for further replies.

TRENDING THREADS

Latest posts

Moderators online

Share this page

COMPANY
RESOURCES
FOLLOW
Top Bottom