NVIDIA GeForce GTX 480 Fermi

[20mmrain]

The water cooled cards are targeted at people that already have a loop (or 2 in my case. lol), or those that already plan to get them. And the Factory watercooled cards never were really uber clocked. They left that to the buyer most of the time.

If I planned on grabbing a 480, I'd seriously consider this card for it's single slot profile. It would take me buying a full coverage block to get it down to single slot anyway, so why not buy one that already comes that way for around the same price as DIY?

The eVGA card is targeted at a different market than the air cooled cards. It is definitely niche, and can't really be compared to the air cards, tbh.

My whole thing is that the GTX 285 and the GTX 280 FTW were overclocked by over 100 mhz and didn't have to be water cooled. Same with the 9800's and the 8800's if I remember correctly.

That doesn't mean EVGA did not make a version that was.

My whole thing is that .... it just shows how warm it is.

With that said though..... if there is an enthusiast that is planning on doing 3 way SLI with these..... I would choose no other card but these. But it is the only way you will get SLI because of how much power they take. I don't see them coming out with a GX2 version for quite some time.

For the facts that .... it would take up less space, Even at stock speeds it would give out less heat and it would be the only way not to kill your temps in the rest of your case.

But Anyway don't get me wrong. these cards are still the new big boy on the block and their performance is still really cool.

There are just too many problems for me...... to actually consider them. Especially the hot warm thing. If I buy a card I don't want it dead in 1 year because it runs hotter then a card really should.

 

[Wile E]

Yeah, they aren't for everyone, that's for sure.

 

[Sanhime]

Not likely. Look like Nvidia need to scrap GF100 completely and move to something that works and make them profit.

I don't know what Nvidia needs to do, but the power consumption and heat output is really up there. Granted that "on paper" GF100 is suppose to be more powerful than the 5970, and therefore it can be logical to say you expect more power consumption and and heat output. That being said, we can look at this differently, this threshold may be the new norm. Since the late 3dfx voodoo and Nvidia TNT, companies been pushing watts and watts and lots of watts. But we can only push raw watts so much, theres a limited before you start melting plastics haha. Think how much the Pentium 4 series was being pushed in term of raw watts and voltages before companies started looking at mainstreaming multicore CPUs. I am sure (or hope) that 6 months from now, Nvidia will find a way to shrink the die even more and make some core changes and release a "485/495" and we will return back to the typical 70C/80C loads.

As a sort of a side note, I am worried that Nvidia might be making the same mistake 3dfx made with their voodoo3/4/5 series. I honestly don't know how much difference GF100 is from its predecessors. Is it a totally different out-of-the-box architecture or just a improvement over the same idea.

 

[dumo]

Galaxy GTX480 and EVGA GTX480 Hydro Copper will be available soon

 

[KaelMaelstrom]

we are hating this card just because of heat noise and those. but EVGA has relieve us with their EVGA GTX480 Hydro Copper. the GTX 480 is only for extreme tesselation. say w1zzard did you put the Tesselation setting into Extreme on the Heaven 2.0 benchmark or you just increase the resolution cause i test my rig with one normal GTX 480 and get 20-24 fps with all settings max and then i try the HD 5970 with all settings max and i get is 8-22 fps. very weird, note that i dont overclock or superclock these 2 beast. and then the GTX 480 FTW Hydro Copper, i get 25-32.3 fps. so i say get this card after 4 months or more and many people in the future will like this card. i heard someone named Trubritar in Youtube say "So,respect this card or the beast may just bite you back!!!"

 

[Conditioned]

Great work on the review! Also tried to digg it but it whined :/

Anyway, I´m considering this card, and I missed fan noise under 'middle' load, ie playback of video.