W1zzardThis morning the first of the long awaited retail GeForce GTX 480 cards arrived. The card came from Zotac and photos are below. It is from the same shipment that will be sold on store shelves in the next days. At first glance the card looks completely identical to the NVIDIA press sample, with the exception of some black foam on the back of the card. Another diffence is the BIOS which I put up for download here.

I am told that the reason for the black foam is to ensure some spacing between the cards when running in SLI mode, so that they can breathe. It is also a safeguard against short circuits which could happen when the metal cooler surface of one card touches the back of the other card.

www.techpowerup.com/img/10-04-09/zotac1_thm.jpg www.techpowerup.com/img/10-04-09/zotac3_thm.jpg

tricksonBENCHMARKS !!! Give us some scores !!! :respect:

W1zzardi dont expect any change in benchmark results vs. the press samples .. running sli testing now

tricksonBENCHMARKS !!! Give us some scores !!! :respect:

KenshaiAny teaser on sli performance?

DOMhow many think the foam is going to catch on fire :p

Musselsmight be used for warranty purposes - if the foams melted, it got too hot.

tiggerOn the pic showing the foam,it looks like they put the sticker over the screw holding the cooler on,i guess they dont want no one changing the cooler.

Munki*must retain self....will not have a spaz attack...breath breath*

I second whoever said that they wanna see pictures of your workbench. I wanna see it too, I'm unsure whether these are elsewhere or not.

Musselsi believe that's his kitchen table.

Musselsi believe that's his kitchen table.

Musselsactually i take that back, might be his kitchen FLOOR - you can see where floor meets wall in the first pic, lol.


anyway, back on topic. burning flaming powerful fermi SLI.