Introduction

Gigabyte's GeForce GTX 480 Super Overclock is a fully customized GTX 480 design. Gigabyte has massively changed the PCB for their GTX 480 SOC, including the power conversion circuitry. Another area of interest is the improved cooling solution on the GTX 480 Super OC which uses a triple fan cooler and vapor chamber heatsink base.
Thanks to Gigabyte's own OC Guru overclocking application, users have control over GPU and memory voltage which comes in handy when doing more extreme overclocking. Another feature for extreme overclockers is the LN2 BIOS on the GTX 480 Super Overclock that is accessible by the press of a button located on the card.
Gigabyte's GeForce GTX 480 SOC is available online for $469 which is only a minor increase compared to other GTX 480 cards that are targeted at overclockers.

The Card

When looking at the card for the first time it becomes apparent how much Gigabyte changed on their card. The huge triple fan cooler is certainly most prominent, but the five Proadlizer capacitors on the back are also eyecatching.


Just like the reference design, the card requires two slots in your system. As you can see, there is a little bulge in the card that should ensure better air delivery when cards are sitting right next to each other in SLI.


The card has two DVI ports and one one mini-HDMI port. Unlike AMD's latest GPUs, the output logic design is not as flexible. On AMD cards vendors are free to combine six TMDS links into any output configuration they want (dual-link DVI consuming two links), on NVIDIA, you are fixed to two DVI outputs and one HDMI/DP in addition to that. NVIDIA confirmed that you can use only two displays at the same time, so for a three monitor setup you would need two cards.

NVIDIA has included an HDMI sound device inside their GPU which does away with the requirement of connecting an external audio source to the card for HDMI audio. The HDMI interface is HDMI 1.3a compatible which includes Dolby TrueHD, DTS-HD, AC-3, DTS and up to 7.1 channel audio with 192 kHz / 24-bit. NVIDIA also claims full support for the 3D portion of the HDMI 1.4 specification which will become important later this year when we will see first Blu-Ray titles shipping with support for 3D output.


You may combine up to four GeForce GTX 480 cards in SLI for increased performance or improved image quality settings. It is also possible to run the GTX 480 Super OC in SLI with other non-SOC cards but this might reduce performance slightly.


Here are the front and the back of the card, high-res versions are also available (front, back). If you choose to use these images for voltmods etc, please include a link back to this site or let us post your article.

A Closer Look

Gigabyte uses a Vapor Chamber heatsink base to transport heat away quickly from the GPU core to the heatsink. You can also see the thermal pads that keep the memory and VRM circuitry cool.


The 6+8 power input configuration is specified up to 300 W maximum power draw. It would have been nice to see a more beefy configuration here to provide plenty of power for hardcore overclockers. On the other hand, this power configuration will have no problems when the other components in the system are designed for overclocking and of high quality.


This little switch near the edge of the PCB lets you toggle between the normal BIOS and a BIOS especially optimized for LN2 usage. This means that there is no coldbug present, for example. Unfortunately the switch is quite difficult to reach when the card is installed in-case, it should be no problem on an open bench.


Gigabyte has included voltage measurement points for the most important GPU voltages on their card. But those measure points are in a horrible location that is almost impossible to get your measurement probes to, even on an open bench. You always have the possibility to solder your own test leads to the solder pads, but I'd prefer a non-permanent solution.


The GDDR5 memory chips are made by Samsung, and carry the model number K4G10325FE-HC04. They are specified to run at 1250 MHz (5000 MHz GDDR5 effective).


Gigabyte has chosen an NCP5395 as voltage regulator. Compared to the CHiL solution of the reference design, the NCP5395 is less capable, but Gigabyte has paired it with another chip to enhance voltage control and monitoring. Overall the solution seems decent but works only well when used with Gigabyte's own overclocking software.


NVIDIA's GF100 graphics processor is made on a 40 nm process at TSMC Taiwan. It uses approximately 3.2 billion transistors which makes it the most complex GPU built to-date. Please note that the silvery metal surface you see is the heatspreader of the GPU which measures 42.3 x 42.3 mm. The actual GPU die is sitting under the heatspreader, and roughly 526 mm² in size.

Test System

Benchmark scores in other reviews are only comparable when this exact same configuration is used.

• All video card results were obtained on this exact system with the exact same configuration.
• All games were set to their highest quality setting

Each benchmark was tested at the following settings and resolution:

• 1024 x 768, No Anti-aliasing. This is a standard resolution without demanding display settings.
• 1280 x 1024, 2x Anti-aliasing. Common resolution for most smaller flatscreens today (17" - 19"). A bit of eye candy turned on in the drivers.
• 1680 x 1050, 4x Anti-aliasing. Most common widescreen resolution on larger displays (19" - 22"). Very good looking driver graphics settings.
• 1920 x 1200, 4x Anti-aliasing. Typical widescreen resolution for large displays (22" - 26"). Very good looking driver graphics settings.
• 2560 x 1600, 4x Anti-aliasing. Highest possible resolution for commonly available displays (30"). Very good looking driver graphics settings.