GTX 480: Your verdict

Your verdict on the GTX 480

  • Total voters
    553
Status
Not open for further replies.
People giving out anything but a one should to take a break, wash their faces and come back to consider what it means for this card to draw over 100-120 watts more than the 5870 whilst delivering similar performance.

The latest power estimate of 250W given by Nvidia is evidently a lie. When I see a card that is so inefficient, so obtrusively hot and under-performing that it strikes me as odd that instead of taking the opportunity to condemn it as unacceptable, Kyle asks us to "take a look... and make up your own mind".

Nvidia has its fingers crossed in hope that reviewers give it a lukewarm review instead of copping on and realising that its silicon is just barely able to be made into a product.
 
People giving out anything but a one should to take a break, wash their faces and come back to consider what it means for this card to draw over 100-120 watts more than the 5870 whilst delivering similar performance.
Click to expand...
There are some people who just don't care about that sort of thing. Maybe they have money to spare. Maybe they have a waterblock lined up, or are going for one of the eVGA cards. Maybe having the most powerful single-GPU card is important to them. Giving a one basically means that nobody would buy the card, because the cons so far outweigh the pros that if you bought one you'd have to be mad off your rocker or an idiot. But that's clearly not the case. There are things going for the 480: it performs about 10-20% better than the 5870, on average. It is priced reasonably competitively. And NVidia has all those gimmicks like CUDA and PhysX to keep people happy. I definitely wouldn't buy a card like this, but there are people who would.
 
I dont see many people buying a card thats only given a 5 either. The only people I see buying these cards are those that have lots and lots of disposable income. The rest of us would not take a chance on a card that draws that much power, overheats and sounds like a hairdryer. For me to buy a card in that price range, it would need to have top notch reviews and nothing below an 8 rating.
 
Pros:
1. Noticeably faster in a few games.
2. SLI performance is unbeatable.

Neutral:
1. About the same performance as 5870 in most games.

Cons:
1. Overpriced due to no significant performance increases in most games as single GPU.
2. Late to the game.
3. Heat output is horrible.
4. Power draw is horrible.
5. Stock cooling is really loud and annoying.

My thoughts on the grading scale would be a 5 is equal to the 5870. Considering raw performance I would give it a 6 since it isn't considerably better than the 5870 but it is somewhat better. The heat, power consumption and noise of the stock cooling definitely drops it a couple of points. SLI performance helps but how late the card is definitely hurts it as well, especially considering the higher price.

Overall, I would rate it as a 4. There are too many cons going against the card to rate it any higher. If the heat, power consumption and noise were the same as the 5870 and had a price much closer to the 5870 I would easily rank it as a 6.

 
I give it a 5. Not that much faster than a 5870, uses way too much power and runs like a hot motherfucker. Not too impressed to be honest, and was it worth the 6 month wait? No. Even the 5870 is more attractive.
 
SmokeRngs said:
Pros:
1. Noticeably faster in a few games.
2. SLI performance is unbeatable.

Neutral:
1. About the same performance as 5870 in most games.

Cons:
1. Overpriced due to no significant performance increases in most games as single GPU.
2. Late to the game.
3. Heat output is horrible.
4. Power draw is horrible.
5. Stock cooling is really loud and annoying.

My thoughts on the grading scale would be a 5 is equal to the 5870. Considering raw performance I would give it a 6 since it isn't considerably better than the 5870 but it is somewhat better. The heat, power consumption and noise of the stock cooling definitely drops it a couple of points. SLI performance helps but how late the card is definitely hurts it as well, especially considering the higher price.

Overall, I would rate it as a 4. There are too many cons going against the card to rate it any higher. If the heat, power consumption and noise were the same as the 5870 and had a price much closer to the 5870 I would easily rank it as a 6.

Click to expand...

Precisely how I would break it down as well.
 
i don't see how 'late to the game' affects its merit

that should strictly be based on the performance and price.

The only con that I see with its late appearance is the lack of competitive pricing on the ATI cards, but that shouldn't have an influence on how you should view the card.
 
I voted "meh" (5).

I prefer nVidia cards above ATI offerings but currently the only danish site I have seen pushing the GTX 470 is asking a price comparable to the HD5870 and I just can't argue for buying a GTX 470 given the reviews and the current price... :(
 
I gave it a solid 7, the performance is where it needs to be in a sense. They set out to have the fastest single GPU and they got it, but it came with a pretty hefty cost, too many delays, building an architecture on 40nm that should've been put on to 32nm.

The constant hyping was the biggest turn off, nVidia really wanted people to think this was the next holy grail of video cards and try to repeat the 8800 success, unfortunately reality is that the architecture on 40nm just draws too much power, the performance isn't on par with the power it's drawing and the Overclocking is stunted when compared to similarly priced cards (5850, 5870)

Overall I think what we'll end up seeing is the 2GB ATi cards really close the gap to a negligible difference, then at some point soon see a 5890 which I'm sure nVidia will counter with the exact same way they did before by adding more cores to the 480 and 470. This architecture is going to be around for a good while and will probably hit it's real stride in a die shrink, ATi's been on a pretty big role lately and the competition has been good for everyone, the 4xx line isn't a failure by any means, but it was impossible to live up to the hype that nVidia continuously put behind it.
 
I don't see the point in this card lol. The temps and price are way out of wack. I mean if it smoked ati's offering from 6 months ago, then fair enough. Too bad it doesn't. I'll be sticking with my 8800gtx till the next best thing.
 
SulSeeker said:
post deleted -Oldie
Click to expand...

Cute. I guess it's abnormal that a higher-priced card clearly can be justified in price due to far better performance in most games. I mean damn, a more expensive card that takes more power is SO unusual, don't you think? Yeah, wanting that means you're (D) in your options, no question! No one here's a "fanboi" so much as going for the best single-GPU product.

Source: http://www.hardwarecanucks.com/foru...iews/30297-nvidia-geforce-gtx-480-review.html
 
Last edited by a moderator:
Personally, I'm waiting for retail cards to be reviewed. Let's not forget that every single card reviewed so far was cherry picked by NVidia before being sent out. Now I hope that these are representative of what will be available from retailers, but no one can guarantee that.
 
Oldie said:
Personally, I'm waiting for retail cards to be reviewed. Let's not forget that every single card reviewed so far was cherry picked by NVidia before being sent out. Now I hope that these are representative of what will be available from retailers, but no one can guarantee that.
Click to expand...

I hope so too... the 5870 seemed to perform better than reviews when I got mine, hopefully the 480 has a bit of time to have its drivers revised (for the better) in these next couple of weeks. End-user reports are important, as are reviews. Worth noting especially is that overclocking usually is quite different from review samples to retail...
 
Here's what I don't get for those that value performance over all else like noise,power usage etc....there's a better card for that - the 5970, not only is it faster it uses less power and not nearly as noisy. If one's going to get that, spend the extra $80-$100. Now finding it in stock is another matter and we don't know much yet about the availability of the 480. But a friend of mine has the 5970 and it took him about 2 weeks after preordering to get his so it's there if one is willing to wait a bit.

Personally i would not buy either..I'm more in the range for a 5850/470 type card but it's looking like the 5850 more and more now. At least I wasn't waiting for Nvidia as my current card does just fine.
 
7

Card is faster in more than a few benches, looks good, but the heat bothers me and the power draw is annoying. The thing I really hate is the multi monitor temp increase, but oh well. It's going to be a card that matures.
 
Morphy, for me at least I don't like dual-GPU solutions (the only one I've owned was 8800GT SLI for a brief time), for a variety of reasons. 5970's seem to run around $650-700 at the moment as well... so it's a good chunk more costly right now (then again that could change once these current $500 GTX 480 prices spike post-launch).
 
Ok GT, I'll bite...

You're right with it being higher priced, and pulling a few screen shots of graphs from another site is an amazing way to show the performance of the card.

And while it may be the best performing single-gpu product on the market... it's still a poor choice for a graphics solution to anyone who is in the market for one.

The performance difference between a 480 and a 5870 isn't worth the price of admission.
The cost of powering a 480 is insane.
The acoustics of the 480 are unbelievable.
The heat output of a 480 is asinine.

So no, you can throw all the benchmarks you want into a post and it still doen't change the face that the 480 (and more so the 470) are not great cards, not even in the slightest.

And this point is double FOR ME since I'll have to look forward to replacing 2 4850's in the future. Maybe the GTX 5x0's will be great, the 4x0s are mediocre at best.

Edit: There is one spot I will applaud the GTX 480's in, and that's GPGPU usage... such as OpenCL and Cuda applications, and anyone buying a card for those particular usages would be best served by a GTX 480 hands down.
 
Sutseeker, we have different criteria then, that's all I can say... for me $500 (GTX 480) is worth it for a card that performs ~20% better (when minimum FPS 25-30% is considered along with average 15-20%) than a $400 card (5870).

Power costs... $2-3 a month isn't that much for the extra power a 480 would require.

Acoustics aren't necessarily terrible once inside your case... that remains to be seen for sure: I am hoping the pitch will be low and a more gentle "whoosh" sound compared to some cards that are a whiny, sharp force of air. Noise is very subjective, regardless... we all have different preferences/tolerances on that.

Heat output doesn't really bother me... I have good cooling.

So, you can say it's not worth it to you, and no one can refute that, but for some high-end gamers it will be.
 
Epic fail. My vote: 4.

Even with a massive heatsink and a fan that sounds like a leaf blower these cards still only barely remain below the throttle point of 105C. In regular gaming, temperatures already measure around 95C, and summer hasn't even started. Furthermore, since all tested cards are brand new, temperatures will only rise in time because of dust. I seriously worry about the longevity of these cards.

Performance is a huge disappointment too. An average increase of 10-15% over the Radeon HD 5870 is simply not good enough for a card that is 6 months late, has a transistor count of +40% and uses around 100 watt of additional power. I really wanted NVIDIA to deliver. I bought a new system recently and I was waiting for GF100 reviews before deciding on a new card. It's all clear now: Radeon HD 5870.

Comparing the Radeon HD 5000 family with NVIDIAs latest offering:

-ATI still has the fastest card: the Radeon HD 5970.
-ATI cards have a better price/performance ratio.
-ATI cards consume less power.
-ATI cards generate less noise.

And yes, I have to give NVIDIA one thing, they have the fastest single GPU card in the world. But for how long? The Radeon HD 5870 Eyefinity Edition with 2GB of memory is out soon and that with a small bump in clock speed is enough for ATI to take the single GPU performance crown back. Considering the fact that ATI has no heat issues, more experience with the TSMC process, and a GPU die that is far smaller, they can easily do it. In fact, third party vendors already offer overclocked Radeon HD 5870 cards.
 
Voted 4

Theres nothing about these cards to be excited about, the performance delta between competing cards is negligable, the power requirements, temps, noise and price are all way up. With price gouging due to set in because of low supply they will probably set you back way more than the RRP, I'd hazard a guess it's close to overlapping with the 5970 prices.
 
I gave it a 7. It avoided the pitfalls of some of the nastier rumors, but it doesn't have any magic. I have a wait-and-see bookmark on the following issues: What will more mature drivers do? Will anyone (including nVidia) get 512 cores working? What are the voltage boost box art pictures going to mean in retail products? Will the tesselation/calculation power matter at some point?

On balance, if I had a need for a new card today, I'd buy a 5850, and that's spoken as someone who prefers nVidia products and drivers when possible. But the rule I've been following for the last year is: No cards over $200 and buy games when they drop to $20. It's saving me a fortune and putting my hobby into better life balance. If the 5850 drops into $200 territory (maybe the 5830 would be enough) my trigger finger will get itchy.
 
Ignoring all other circumstances like the fact the competition has been available for 6 months I gave it an 8, with heat and power being the drawback that almost pushed it to a 7. My number 1 criteria is now 3 monitor capability though so I can't place it for sure until it can actually do this feature and I see how it benches with its software-esque implementation..
 
Commander Suzdal said:
...and that's spoken as someone who prefers nVidia products and drivers when possible.
Click to expand...
May I ask why you prefer NVIDIA drivers? I often see that people say that NVIDIA drivers are better, but I haven't seen any good reasons why they are better. On the contrary, with reports like these and these, and with the nice performance improvement of Catalyst 10.3 and things like bezel compensation, I'm inclined to believe that ATI drivers are nowadays better overall.
 
Because AMD drivers used to be absolutely horrid. Radeon 8500 drivers had the blurry textures to compete with the geforce 4's back in the day. They improved with the radeon 97/9800, Then when the x1900 and x2900 cards were out CCC was a bloated piece of crap. The drivers started getting under control and damn good and stable since the 3800 series and onward.

Nvidia Drivers have been pretty stable since well... TNT2?... but not without their own issues, but none as glaring as those from ATI.
 
Voted 4

The temps temps are NOT ok considering it's a single gpu.

If you're going to buy 480, you really need to take lifetime warranty, I don't care what nvidia says about it can withstand such a high temp, pure bullshit. 95c is not ok.

this thing really needs WC.

And it even more powerhungry than 5970, hahaohwow.jpg
 
SulSeeker said:
Because AMD drivers used to be absolutely horrid. Radeon 8500 drivers had the blurry textures to compete with the geforce 4's back in the day. They improved with the radeon 97/9800, Then when the x1900 and x2900 cards were out CCC was a bloated piece of crap. The drivers started getting under control and damn good and stable since the 3800 series and onward.

Nvidia Drivers have been pretty stable since well... TNT2?... but not without their own issues, but none as glaring as those from ATI.
Click to expand...
Past issues aside though, since ATI was bought by AMD, it certainly seems that ATI has the better drivers nowadays. It's of course difficult to objectively measure which company has the better drivers, but as said before, reports like these and these do make me wonder about NVIDIA quality control.
 
[X]eltic;1035512654 said:
Past issues aside though, since ATI was bought by AMD, it certainly seems that ATI has the better drivers nowadays. It's of course difficult to objectively measure which company has the better drivers, but as said before, reports like these and these do make me wonder about NVIDIA quality control.
Click to expand...

I'm not going to take the time to look it up right now, but in addition to the long history cited by Sulseeker, several recent [H] reviews have mentioned significant driver problems in the 5000 series even while rightly praising its performance and feature support. If you only skim the reviews for the charts, you would have missed that. A couple of recent and quickly-fixed nVidia issues doesn't change the bigger picture. I have also had ATi cards fail to work properly right out of the box in both personal and for-hire situations, while that has never happened to me with an nVidia card.
 
Commander Suzdal said:
I'm not going to take the time to look it up right now, but in addition to the long history cited by Sulseeker, several recent [H] reviews have mentioned significant driver problems in the 5000 series even while rightly praising its performance and feature support. If you only skim the reviews for the charts, you would have missed that. A couple of recent and quickly-fixed nVidia issues doesn't change the bigger picture. I have also had ATi cards fail to work properly right out of the box in both personal and for-hire situations, while that has never happened to me with an nVidia card.
Click to expand...

Ditto, it's anecdotal, sure, but it's my experience as well. Thus nowadays I lean toward nVidia even though I've swapped back and forth many, many times in the past. I tend to find myself getting burnt whenever I try an ATI product.
 
The deciding reason for me not to go with a pair of 5870s was because of the GSOD, which was due to drivers. That had to suck for the many that suffered/suffering from that. Sure, not all owners had that issue but jeez, I didn't even want to mess with it.
 
SulSeeker said:
Because AMD drivers used to be absolutely horrid. Radeon 8500 drivers had the blurry textures to compete with the geforce 4's back in the day. They improved with the radeon 97/9800, Then when the x1900 and x2900 cards were out CCC was a bloated piece of crap. The drivers started getting under control and damn good and stable since the 3800 series and onward.

Nvidia Drivers have been pretty stable since well... TNT2?... but not without their own issues, but none as glaring as those from ATI.
Click to expand...

Never had any real problems with ATi drivers and my X1900XT (aside from the original Oblivion hack, but that was third-party code and I soon tired of the game itself anyway). Yes CCC was shit-slow at first, but really how many times do you need to open it? Really loved that card actually, started my obsession with watercooling GPUs (stock heatsink was quite nasty). Can't speak for the 8500 or 2900 cards - nVidia had the better product so I went with them.
I've had bugger all issues with the drivers from either vendor - I can recall a minor issue in GRID on my 4870 (logo screen occasionally exhibited corruption, but never in-game or on the menu) and not being able to force AA in some games (such as Bioshock). Observed some OpenGL problems and performance issues with recent nVidia drivers (plus the overclocking bug), but I just rolled back to the previous set. No big deal. Still, I'd count certain nV drivers apparently bricking hardware as a fairly glaring issue!
Older games are a different matter, but that's the nature of progress. NV have tended to be a bit more problematic in this area (off the top of my head - Infinity Engine needs some options set to software, otherwise you get glitched graphics), but there are some (most notably Silver, which I really want to re-play) that haven't worked on either party's hardware for quite some time. Luckily I have the parts to build an old AthlonXP/GeForce2 GTS rig and there should be Win98/2k discs around here somewhere....it's just getting around to actually doing it.
 
Vegasr said:
The deciding reason for me not to go with a pair of 5870s was because of the GSOD, which was due to drivers. That had to suck for the many that suffered/suffering from that. Sure, not all owners had that issue but jeez, I didn't even want to mess with it.
Click to expand...

True, this did make me a little wary of going with a 5850. My seemingly great luck with drivers has to run out eventually, but I think I'll push it all the same! I'm not prepared to pay 5870 prices for the GTX470 when it appears to be slower than a 5850.
 
Circumnavigate said:
who the FUCK gave it a 10? Nvidia PR?
Click to expand...

The same person that started the "Fermi is being misrepresented" thread, and several other people besides. Even GoldenTiger only gave it a 9 :p

I don't see how this card can be rated higher than 8 or lower than 3, but the fangirls from either camp are out in force according to the results.
 
There's something missing in all these "arguments"..........

PC gaming has launched itself into an entire new place with EyeFinity and nvidia Surround.

Single-card, single-monitor is a non-starter as far as I am concerned.

We don't have one sliver of data as to how the 480 SLi compares to the 5870 or 5970 Crossfire in multimonitor gaming.

I'm guessing that the 480 has some pretty impressive horsepower for multimoniotor gaming, IF it can best the 5870 using DX11 graphics full on it will be a shining star.......but you'll need two cards and a pretty beastly power supply.

Right now I have two 5870s and I can't see going back to single monitor gaming. The one downside is that the 5870 1GB model does strain a little with heavy DX11 demands. If the 480s can trump that, kudos to nvidia.

I can't wait to see those reviews, as well as the 5870 2GB models in head to head competition.:D
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top