Gigabyte's timing with their GeForce GTX 480 Super Overclock couldn't be worse. With the first stores getting stock only weeks after NVIDIA released their new GeForce GTX 580, a lot of potential customers will be considering the GTX 480 "old stuff". But this is not entirely true. Gigabyte has done a great job tweaking the GTX 480 design for overclockers. Several features have been added, like the dual BIOS that helps extreme overclockers with liquid nitrogen. Less extreme users will certainly like the voltage measurement points (even if they are incredibly hard to reach) and the software voltage control for GPU, memory and PCI-E voltage. Other improvements are more powerful voltage regulation circuitry and a triple fan cooling solution. Thanks to Gigabyte's new cooler, the card runs over 10°C cooler than NVIDIA's reference design which helps keep fan noise levels down and reduces power consumption significantly. In most of our tests the GTX 480 SOC at 820 MHz consumes less power than NVIDIA's reference design, which runs at 700 MHz. This clock increase of 120 MHz over the reference design, which is higher than any other GTX 480 available today, can also help catapult the card into performance regions close to NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 580. In our testing we see around 8% performance improvement over the GTX 480, with only 3% to go to match the GTX 580.
Gigabyte has priced their GTX 480 Super Overclock at a very reasonable $469 which is only $20 more than the reference design and far less than other "overclock" editions like the MSI Lightning or ZOTAC AMP! Edition. So when looking at price/performance in this $400+ segment, the Gigabyte GTX 480 Super OC is actually the card with the best price/performance ratio. But that still does not change the fact that it is based on the older GeForce GTX 480. I think that if Gigabyte can quickly adapt their board design to the GF110 used on the GeForce GTX 580 and release the GTX 580 SOC soon, without an exorbitant price increase they might have a winner on their hands.