On The Bench: Gigabyte GeForce GTX 470 Super Overclock

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Would have been nice to see a gtx 480 benchmark in there.
It matters to compare value.

Kudos to them for dropping the power / heal / noise though. VERY attractive card.
 

magicandy

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[citation][nom]nilll[/nom]Would have been nice to see a gtx 480 benchmark in there.It matters to compare value.Kudos to them for dropping the power / heal / noise though. VERY attractive card.[/citation]

In the section entitled "Overclocked Performance" there is a link given at the end to some factory OC'd GTX 480 benchmarks. This card, when manually overclocked further, is just about as good as a GTX 480 and even comes close to the Factory OC'd 480.

I was planning to do a whole GTX 470 SLI rig with water cooling so I could get a nice OC like this, but I think I might forgo the water cooling and get these for my Xclio Windtunnel w/side fan blowers.
 

retardedspleen

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[citation][nom]magicandy[/nom]Doesn't 3GB of ram seem kind of low for a modern i7 gaming rig?[/citation]

Yeah, 3gb is kinda low.. I wasnt even aware they made 3gb tri-channel kits for the x58
 

AMW1011

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With the GPU voltage increased from 0.996 V to 1.167 V, we raise the Gigabyte GV-N470SO-13I’s core clock to 800 MHz and the shader clock to 1600 MHz. The result is a stable overclock. And, from what we’ve seen in the past, this is more than you can usually expect out of a reference GeForce GTX 470.

So... you didn't bother trying to push it any farther? Plus, 800 MHz on the core is pretty common for a GTX 470. This lazy overclocking section ruined it for me, and I'm in the market for a GTX 470.

Can you please give us the max overclock Don? That would be awesome.

Also, what fan speed is the Gigabyte and reference GTX 470s at during the temp analysis?
 

chefboyeb

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magicandy :

Doesn't 3GB of ram seem kind of low for a modern i7 gaming rig?





Yeah, 3gb is kinda low.. I wasnt even aware they made 3gb tri-channel kits for the x58

3 gigs of ram is not close to even being bad for an Intel X58 rig. I have 3 1gig supertalent ddr1800 on an Evga X58 SLI LE MOBO paired with an I7 920 overclocked to 4.1 (1.23 VCore), and 2 9800GTX+ Superclocked Sli-ed, and the entire setup flies... Even WEI score is a 7.4... It handles Crysis with buttery smoothness... Think about it, how much of your 6gigs of ram, does your system really ever use at any instance? Before 6 became affordable, 3 was the way to go, unless you just starting building computers that is...
 

skora

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For the ram, do this, load up your most resource hungry game. Tab out of it and into task manager. See how much ram you're really using. Unless you've left Photo shop and CAD and ripping some video and ..... you won't be near that 3gb level. Win 7 uses just under a gig and even something as poorly optimized as GTA IV only uses 1.5 gigs. And that's VERY high for a game. Fallout 3 came in at 550k. So for gaming, 3gbs is plenty. Only reason 4 is the standard is the dual channel platforms and from when DDR2 w as $25 for 4 gigs. Didn't make sense to go lower then. But for budget rigs, 2gbs is fine and 3 more than enough for an x58 gaming platform.
 

epileptic

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3DMark Vantage shows us a 9% performance advantage in favor of the Gigabyte GV-N470SO-13I Super Overclock, compared to the reference GeForce GTX 470 card. This isn’t quite as high as Gigabyte’s claimed 12% performance increase, but it’s definitely in the ballpark.

Can someone please explain how they got that 9%? (20252-18070)/18070 yields the claimed 12% increase. Am I really that bad at math?
 

hillarymakesmecry

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[citation][nom]skora[/nom]For the ram, do this, load up your most resource hungry game. Tab out of it and into task manager. See how much ram you're really using. Unless you've left Photo shop and CAD and ripping some video and ..... you won't be near that 3gb level. Win 7 uses just under a gig and even something as poorly optimized as GTA IV only uses 1.5 gigs. And that's VERY high for a game. Fallout 3 came in at 550k. So for gaming, 3gbs is plenty. Only reason 4 is the standard is the dual channel platforms and from when DDR2 w as $25 for 4 gigs. Didn't make sense to go lower then. But for budget rigs, 2gbs is fine and 3 more than enough for an x58 gaming platform.[/citation]

You're wrong. I had a stick go bad and sent it in for replacement. I went from 4 gigs to 3 gigs to 2 gigs and now back to 4. CS:S stutters with only 2gb of ram(win764). Loading anything is ridiculously slow with 2gb. Tabbing out of a game back to windows takes 3 seconds with 4gb and a full minute with 2 gb.

There's very little difference between 3 and 4 gb, but I have noticed some. When starting up a game there are a couple of pauses when it's getting going on 3gb but after that they're pretty much the same from what I can tell.

Telling someone all they need is 2gb is a lie. Even my dad complained when I gave him a computer (vista32)with 2 gb. When I put in another stick the whining stopped. Pull some ram out of your computer then come back and tell us it's not needed.
 
[citation][nom]magicandy[/nom]Doesn't 3GB of ram seem kind of low for a modern i7 gaming rig?[/citation]

Agreed and 3gb isn't much these days as it used to be. Personally I can use more than 4gb easily when playing 4 instances of wow while web browsing.
 

youssef 2010

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[citation][nom]retardedspleen[/nom]Yeah, 3gb is kinda low.. I wasnt even aware they made 3gb tri-channel kits for the x58[/citation]

but, in aprevious article, they demonstrated that no game uses more than 2GB of ram, and they have no background applications like we do as it's solely for benchmark purposes. So,2 gigs for the game and one for the system.
 

akorzan

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Windows 7 64 bit on 4 gigabytes of ram uses a little over 1 gigabyte with a clean install and drivers. Games generally don't run over 2 gigabytes in the worst case scenario.

I have a 2 gigabyte laptop and when I play Crysis on it Windows swaps many processes and kills alot of features such a Windows Aero. Idling at the desktop in my laptop, Windows 7 64 will use roughly 900 Mb... after playing a game and turning it off Windows uses 400 Mb which slowly increases back to 900.

So the conclusion is that you can run most games with 2 Gb of ram but your overall computer experience will decrease dramatically because of the constant swapping.


On a side note: Does Windows swap even if there is still ram left? For example on 2 gigs of ram Windows 7 64 uses 900 Mb... on 4 gigs it uses 1.1 Gbs... All on clean installs... the 2 gig computer running home premium and 4 gig ultimate.
 

kansur0

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Why don't they reveal how this card affects other parts inside the system? This thing is blowing what I would assume to be hot air into the case. Does this not put a strain on other parts in the system? CPU temps? Power supply temps? RAM temps?

Also...put this card up against a stock 480. Those cards vent the air out of the case.
 

cleeve

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[citation][nom]epileptic[/nom]Can someone please explain how they got that 9%? (20252-18070)/18070 yields the claimed 12% increase. Am I really that bad at math?[/citation]

I can explain it easily, my friend. I messed up the calculation...

Fixed! ;)
 
When playing STALKER: Call of Pripyat with Atmosfear and the Absolute Nature + Structure packs, the game itself can use 2.7gb of RAM. I upgraded from 4GB to 8GB and my total usage while ONLY playing that game hits 5.56GB lol. With 4GB RAM the game would lag for HDD access and it was nigh unplayable - and since I had the GPU head room I didn't want to bother lowering settings below Maximum. Now it runs nicely with about 40fps min :D
My point is that 3GB RAM is indeed on the low side, even for "just a gaming PC".

As for the article, pretty nice. Great card. I wish, oh how I wish, you could buy these awesome coolers on their own - I had to buy Scythe Setsugen's for my 5850s because only those and Zalman VF1000's will fit in the same 2 PCIe slot space I require. Everything else was 3 to 4 slots for aftermarket cooling. So lame!!
 
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