Quiet GTX 480? Forget about it!

[Tzupy]

While it's performance places it at the top of the single-GPU card roster, the power draw is humongous:
http://www.madshrimps.be/vbulletin/f22/ ... ans-71048/
Apparently is uses a bit more power than the dual-GPU 5970. To the unlucky future owners of this beast, my condolences.
You can forget about cooling it quietly, maybe with something like the MK-13 there is a slight chance to lower the noise, but 99% of PSUs would ramp up a lot.

[Kaleid]

As I expected with the way too many transistors for 40nm plus the 384bit memory bus.

Edit; Listen to the cards:
http://hardocp.com/article/2010/03/26/n ... i_review/7

[mr_plow_king]

Even with a MK-13 the problem would be the VRM temperatures. With 250w going trough the card, they would be as hot as hell unless you buy seperate heatsinks for them

[Big Pimp Daddy]

Oh dear nvidia, slightly better performance than the 5850/5870 for the 470/480 at the cost of 100W additional load power. Not good. And god only knows what the price premium will be.

Should we make it an official forum rule that the first SPCRer to admit to owning one is perma-banned?

[rpsgc]

There are official reviews already you know.

http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=3783
http://www.hardwarecanucks.com/forum/ha ... eview.html
http://www.pcgameshardware.com/aid,7434 ... s/Reviews/
http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/NVID ... _480_Fermi
http://www.guru3d.com/article/geforce-g ... 80-review/
http://www.computerbase.de/artikel/hard ... e_gtx_480/
http://www.legitreviews.com/article/1258/1/
http://www.hardocp.com/article/2010/03/ ... sli_review

[mr_plow_king]

Should we make it an official forum rule that the first SPCRer to admit to owning one is perma-banned?

Unless you want to fold with it. It's 4 times faster than the GTX285. you'll probably get 60 000 ppd

[ces]

Unless you want to fold with it. It's 4 times faster than the GTX285. you'll probably get 60 000 ppd

What are these things, Supercomputers?

[mr_plow_king]

it's a supercomputer first, and a video card second

[Big Pimp Daddy]

Unless you want to fold with it. It's 4 times faster than the GTX285. you'll probably get 60 000 ppd

Fair point, I retract my proposal.

[~El~Jefe~]

Should we make it an official forum rule that the first SPCRer to admit to owning one is perma-banned?

Unless you want to fold with it. It's 4 times faster than the GTX285. you'll probably get 60 000 ppd

the chances you destroy the environment more using this much crude oil for energy is about 99.99% more likely than finding the missing link to whatever the researcher is trying to find... and probably won't. .... which is why youre calculating it and not them.

[mr_plow_king]

Crude oil ? I live in Quebec, 95% hydro-électricity so it's " clean " for the environment.

[swivelguy2]

the chances you destroy the environment more using this much crude oil for energy is about 99.99% more likely than finding the missing link to whatever the researcher is trying to find... and probably won't. .... which is why youre calculating it and not them.

Perhaps true. I wish we could find a comparison of "watts per publication" between F@H and more traditional molecular biology research. It would probably be staggering (but then I'm just speculating).

[EsaT]

And god only knows what the price premium will be.

More precisely god only knows will this chip ever be made in bigger quantities than initial demobatch meant for BS'ing around and fooling people away from competitor who is actually delivering.

Crude oil ? I live in Quebec, 95% hydro-électricity so it's " clean " for the environment.

With this huge amount of manufactured broken garbage making every single working Fermi has definitely used really huge amounts of electricity and resources.
And let's not forget all that electricity and paper which has been wasted for BS in history of this POS.

Even though it was similar crap in the end at least Intel was able to manufacture large quantities of NetBurst CPUs!

it's a supercomputer first, and a video card second

And electric heater in both.

[~El~Jefe~]

lol nice posts

hydro electric destroys natural environments!

sucks doesnt it?

that water was doing something before it was stopped!

yes, the making of the 480 took 1+ years of work. that is massive amounts of crude oil. 100's of 1000's of barrels.

for a nice fps

yeah, i havent seen anyone have the balls to step up and show how few of things found by folding. It is like saying, "dont take mass transit, everyone drive 1970 buick Electra's and never let off the gas, that's the way of the future!"

[Bobert]

Hook up a second monitor and idle power consumption jumps 80w with 90c temps. This thing will make a nice space heater under the desk.

Go here. I need 3 posts before I can link (remove space) :
legitreviews .com/article/1258/15/

[chode]

As I expected with the way too many transistors for 40nm plus the 384bit memory bus.

Edit; Listen to the cards:
http://hardocp.com/article/2010/03/26/n ... i_review/7

The first time I watched those videos I almost threw up.

Graphics card makers need to get a control of themselves. That noise level is unreasonable.

[rei]

Love my 5850. This is where it's at for non-silent but reasonably quiet.

[MamiyaOtaru]

Crude oil ? I live in Quebec, 95% hydro-électricity so it's " clean " for the environment.

And if you weren't using it all, some of it could be exported, so someone else wouldn't have to use as much crude oil. "Clean" power is a very limited resource. The more of it you use, the more crude oil is being used elsewhere.

[nutball]

Meh. The two IHVs seem to be taking it in turns to make stupidly hot, crap cards with high power consumption and not-worth-the-price-or-power performance.

[WR304]

In some situations it could be a very useful card as this comparison chart summarises.


Nvidia GTX480 and GTX470 compared to ATI HD5xxx cards

Taken from:
http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread. ... st29594136

I don't think you're going to see very many of these GTX480/ GTX470 cards actually available. They'll make enough to try and save face and stop the widespread criticism of being six months late, before moving swiftly on to a refreshed model as soon as possible. The performance of these cards in games doesn't seem that bad. A GTX480 is slightly faster in some games than an ATI HD5870 - enough that its possible to argue the point about which is faster (just look at all the threads on hardware review sites about these cards! ).

One thing that I really like about the GTX480 is the styling of the cooler. I think that the exposed nickel plated heatpipes and cut out in the shroud with bare metal beneath look good with a Thermalright look to it (even if the fan is noisy).


Nvidia GTX480 cooler

The issue is more about the poor power consumption and high pricing (£420 GBP for a GTX480 in the UK apparently). which makes it hard to justify. It's a shame that with pricing like that ATI HD5xxx series cards prices will probably stay expensive too.

The big argument you'll see advanced in favour of one of these GTX470/ GTX480 cards over an ATI HD5xxx card would be that the Nvidia drivers are better than the ATI Catalyst ones. Having recently moved from a Nvidia GTX260 card to a ATI HD5870 the ATI drivers I've used (10.3 preview and 10.3a Catalyst Windows 7 64 bit versions) have worked quite well with no real problems on a single monitor setup. With the ATI HD5870 there have been some crashes and odd textures in Just Cause 2 (which may be down to the game), a few crashes in Assassins Creed 2 (when the DRM would let the game run), along with the occasional times (Dawn Of War 2: Chaos rising) when the screen suddenly flashes grey for a second before resuming normal but nothing that I'd call really bad.

[Tzupy]

LOL, it's really funny, thanks for showing this cooking time graph!

I also don't think the consumer cards are going to sell well, but I'm pretty sure the professional computing cards will sell like (extremely) hot cakes.
The performance in CUDA and OpenCL is very good, and these cards will make building powerful computer farms easier, despite their huge power draw.

I like the cooler, except the direct-touch part, since it's only 100% useful with a large die like the one of the Fermi chip.
If we could have the GTX 470's cooler on a HD 5850, which draws almost 100W less, it could be silent in 2D and reasonably quiet in 3D.

[lodestar]

I wish people would not waste forum space on graphics card fanboyism. The fact is that as far as I can see ATI 5870/5970 and potential Fermi GTX 470 and 480 owners are able or willing to spend £300+ on a graphics card, and the supporting high air flow case, high end CPU, high end PSU etc etc to go with it. These top end graphics cards have always been large, expensive, power guzzlers, and noisy and whether one or other models have more or less of these attributes to me is a bit obscure. But people are free to spend their own money as they see fit, I guess....

The point being is that the top end cards, relative to the graphics card market as a whole, sell in penny numbers and the big sellers are the low to mid range cards. Certainly there seem to mid-range Fermi derivatives on the way and if nothing else it will mean a greater choice in a market where currently ATI clearly have the newest technology. However some of that technology is certainly being oversold. For example the ability to use three monitors at once or game in DirectX 11 - and the point of this in low end cards is?

Moving to .40 technology has enabled both ATI and nVidia to produce at the lower end of their ranges some passively cooled cards which have low power consumption, and feature either CUDA or Stream which by reducing CPU loads can be a real help in achieving a cool and quiet system. I would be much more interested in seeing something about this in this forum than the fanatical ruminations of ATI or nVidia graphics card zealots.

[EsaT]

These top end graphics cards have always been large, expensive, power guzzlers, and noisy and whether one or other models have more or less of these attributes to me is a bit obscure.

Except that never before there has been as big power consumption difference for so little extra performance.
Closest thing is R9700 Pro vs. GeForce FX situation... and when you consider performance per used power it's probably same.

[nutball]

n/m

[WR304]

These top end graphics cards have always been large, expensive, power guzzlers, and noisy and whether one or other models have more or less of these attributes to me is a bit obscure. But people are free to spend their own money as they see fit, I guess....

However some of that technology is certainly being oversold. For example the ability to use three monitors at once or game in DirectX 11 - and the point of this in low end cards is?

You raise a few interesting points there.

There have been several changes to high end graphics cards over the last few years. One change that's worth pointing out is that high end graphics cards from the last few years have much more advanced power saving capabilities than older cards. When at idle these cards throttle down their clock and memory speeds significantly to reduce power consumption which older cards didn't do to anything like the same extent.

Top end graphics cards may not sell in huge numbers compared to mid or low range graphics cards but you'll often see new features introduced on the flagship cards first. That's especially true with the new Nvidia cards. These new features, such as improved power saving modes, then trickle down through the range improving the mid-low end cards.

The other question is whether the extra performance of a relatively high end card is necessary in order to play DirectX 11 games at smooth framerates. As you say, lower end DirectX 11 graphics cards aren't that useful as they lack the required power to actually run current games with DirectX 10/ DirectX 11 features enabled. If you want to play a game such as Metro 2033 or Aliens vs Predator in DirectX 11 with the graphics turned up you need all the performance you can get. Metro 2033 does quite a good job of killing my graphics card with smoke effects. I've been trying to avoid throwing too many hand grenades as it really slows the game down to 20FPS or so when in the middle of a big firefight. That's with everything maxed including 4x AA and 16x AF at a 1280x1024 resolution.


Metro 2033 DirectX 11 "Anomaly" level


Metro 2033 DirectX 11 "Anomaly" level framerate

[flinx]

lodestar, except Nvidia hasn't come out with any low end parts yet, so this is what we have to deal with. Unfortunately as we've seen the GTX 470/480 parts are pretty much unusable for silencer purposes - the only way I can imagine being able to deal with the heat output is water/liquid cooling, and that has its own unique challenges.

And yes, EyeFinity on low-end cards is pointless for gaming. I can see it being useful for productivity apps however.

[aristide1]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VpZXhR1ibj8

You need to read the subtitles with this. Warning - explicit language.