NVIDIA Fermi - GTX 470 - GTX 480 - GTX 480 SLI Review @ [H]

R3MF said:
cheers for the review hard-team.

leaves me in a pickle however, as i want something more modern than a 5870, more effective than a 480, and i want to buy in May! :p
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Just buy another 5870 then. Or sell your 5870 and buy a 5970. C'mon you really want to go nvidia after this dud of a review. Yes the 480 is an okay GPU, but for the power, heat and price why not go AMD/ATI?
 
Thanks for the honest review! The bit and videos on sound were a great addition, thanks for doing that part also.
 
DD_nVidia said:
I was gonna grab a 470... but I might try stretch for the 480 since there does seem to be a fair enough performance gap.

I usually buy the first one down (4600TI, 6800GT, 8800GTS) from the top models since the gap is usually nothing that can't be mostly closed down by some light/moderate OCing. But judging by the temps I'm thinking I might forgo that haha.

My main reason for buying Nvidia, besides my sheer blind (and possibly stupid) company loyalty, is the fact I wan the GPGPU for processing video, images etc and hopefully Adobe take full advantage of this. I'd quite like to process 22MP+ RAW Images a bit faster (its pretty fast but not instant) and editing multi layer 16Bit TIFF's which easily build up to over 1GB per image could certainly be a bit faster, My i7 no likey :(
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You have no sig, what PSU do you have right now?
 
Dear Kyle,

I would like to see these setup compared to each other:
Multi monitor: 2x HD 5870 vs. 2x GTX 480
$500 range: 2x HD 5850 vs GTX 480
$700 range: 2x GTX 470 vs HD 5970

Thanks.
 
faugusztin said:
@qdemn7, even if it is good at folding - do you seriously consider running your card 24/7 at 90-95C and at vacuum cleaner noise level ?
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Well, IF I buy one, and I probably won't, I would definitely W/C the thing.
 
I'm hoping for a major price drop and/or drivers to improve performance before I buy an NVIDIA card. Just not enough to make me jump on it. I've been with the red team for a while, haven't been with green since the 4600 times (before the 9700 Pro came out). I'd welcome the GPU physics and the F@H increase in performance, but I'm a gamer at heart. Just not worth it in my opinion.

My upgrade time is in a few months, so I'll see where it is at then. Just seems like they are a bit behind in this. ATI had the same speed last year (as mentioned in the article). Nothing truely revolutionary. I was expecting a LOT more. With all the hype surrounding Fermi, I thought it would be better than what it is.

Thanks for the honest review, guys. I guess this generation (well, ATI may come out with new stuff soon, maybe) will be based on personal brand preference.
 
So essentially it's a continuation of what has been true for many years: NVIDIA rules the highest end of the price spectrum, while AMD is still the best budget card for us college students.
 
Finally got around to listening to the cards and those videos really helped! I know I complain a lot about the lack of sound reviews and this is an awesome way to show off what sounds the make! Do you think you guys could make a database/ single page of any future video card sound recordings? Maybe something along the lines of Anand's bench, but for sound? I think that would be incredibly useful! I have to say the sound the GF100's make my ears hurt. In comparison to my g92 8800gts how loud is the 5850?
 
I'm not sure why eveyrone is bringing up the fx series debacle because this is not similar at all. The gtx480 in general performed "better" than the 5870 even though the difference was only by a couple fps.

I think the real issue is nvidia took an extra 6 months and really has nothing to show for it. Yes the gtx480 can be considered th fastest single gpu card but putting the heat and power issue aside it is not worth the $100 premium for a few fps gain. if they dropped the price to match the 5870 then it would not be as bad.

On a side note. As it stand now it is roughly the same or cheaper or get a 5850cf setup than 1 gtx480 and the performance would be better on the 5850cf. Which goes to show you the unbalanced pricing of nvidia cards.

Moral of the story is nvidia should drop price to match 5870 and then focus on their next card learning from their past mistakes.
 
Id really like to see what the numbers are once this George Foreman grill (GTX 480) gets planted in a Case. Surely the temps might go up 1 or 2 degrees ?
What has not been mentioned is the proper Case that will be needed for this thing as Im not so sure you can just purchase and install this card in most any Case.


Kyle/Brent ? Any idea on that ?
 
osirus35 said:
Moral of the story is nvidia should drop price to match 5870 and then focus on their next card learning from their past mistakes.
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The problem with that, of course, is margins and yield, etc. for nVidia. And the fact that AMD is in a much, much better position to get into a price war with graphics cards. Their chips are small, their process more mature, and they've been raking it in unopposed for the last 6 months.

I'd love to see price drops and some competition. Maybe next gen?
 
Nathen said:
Id really like to see what the numbers are once this George Foreman grill (GTX 480) gets planted in a Case. Surely the temps might go up 1 or 2 degrees ?
What has not been mentioned is the proper Case that will be needed for this thing as Im not so sure you can just purchase and install this card in most any Case.


Kyle/Brent ? Any idea on that ?
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I don't think it'll get hotter - the fan will just spin faster (and louder)

Apparently the fan's goal is to keep the card under 95 C, which means that given a hotter environment it'll kick it up a notch to compensate. Keep in mind that a lot of stock fans rarely ever reach 100% speed. I know my 5870 never goes above 31% fan speed on load.
 
Scotty_SFF said:
Well, here's hoping the 500 series will actually be something impressive.
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Not really. We need 1 or 2 more AMD/ATI cards to stay on top to maintain price pressure. As of launch day, we should see Nvidia slowly take a price pressure hit. Shortly thereafter AMD/ATI should announce a refresh but no prices. When the refresh hits you'll see about a 10% increase, but they should go up in price as well.

For all of you whom think the last part is bullsh*t, you obviously are pretty young. Heck, AMD jacked prices of the Athlon 64's after it was apparent that Intel had nothing to take back the score crown with. Now Intel's done the same thing with the Core series.

The way it was, and the way it always shall be. Only fanboi's claim differently.
 
Wenglish said:
The problem with that, of course, is margins and yield, etc. for nVidia. And the fact that AMD is in a much, much better position to get into a price war with graphics cards. Their chips are small, their process more mature, and they've been raking it in unopposed for the last 6 months.

I'd love to see price drops and some competition. Maybe next gen?
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Nvidia will probably drop a bit over time. AMD/ATI will probably raise them with the refresh now that they don't have to worry about the current gen.
 
Good review..personally it would take an act of god to get me to buy ATi hardware for my rig however..the last 3 cards I had from them were terrible. Ended up RMA'ing the same one twice...fan failures and burned up GPUs..wheeee. Fortunately nVidia has treated me well these last few years and I've never, ever, had to RMA one. Call me a fanboy if you want, even if the results for the fermi stuff arent quite as amazing as I'd like at launch, even though I'm due for a new video card..I still wont buy anything from ati.
 
qdemn7 said:
Well, IF I buy one, and I probably won't, I would definitely W/C the thing.
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W/C as in Wheel Chair or water cool? LOL
I can see Fermi in the old folks home now in a wheel chair, oxygen by nasal canula, An IV of saline in its arm to cool it off, talking about the "soft launch" day and how it should have taken it's Viagra that day. How it lost it's cool and blew fuses every time someone opened a tab in a web browser. :)
California wants to ban the sale of large screen plasma TVs, this card is going to be on that list shortly.
 
maxius said:
you need to get outside more
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This maybe a true statement....:p

point 1 ati has good drivers ive used them for years not a problem, also ati has yet to recall a driver that kills cards :p
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Fair enough. But have you tried ATI in Linux very much. There has been an improvement, but so far as I can tell it is no where near Nvidia. ATI uses .net too much IMO.

point 6 what does the 480 bring that is future tech amd is already sporting 3d support, opencl programing language and eyefinity not to mention an open physics api
nv has its sli version of eyefinity and 3d not to mention cuda and its proprietary physics standard

tech standpoint ati is ahead due to the use of open standards
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I was talking about hardware only. The Fermi was designed with double precision performance and branch prediction algorithms. Did ATI do anything special in hardware specifically for gpgpu? Maybe they have, I would like to know about it. But I haven't seen it.

To me what Nvidia did was bold and dangerous with this generation. It has cost them, I think we all agree. However, I also think it was the right move, and as time goes on both ATI and Nvidia will benefit from the Fermi.

Also, those are only my opinions from the necessarily limited amount of information I have. I meant no offense and can't really offer much in the way of support for my claims since I will not try to dig up links. In fact I have tried that in the past, and it mattered not. People seem to believe what they want no matter what you show them.:(
 
I would have to give ATI/AMD a lot of credit about not letting the true capabilities of 5800 series cards out to Nvidia. I think Nvidia was definitely caught off guard and had to ramp up performance of fermi at the cost of power and temperature. All of which doesn't help Nvidia, hopefully Nvidia can do a die shrink and get those temps down, Damn those temps were high:eek::eek:.
 
I've been sitting back reading the reviews and comparing. I have two 480s on preorder and am going back and forth on whether I should cancel.

When it comes down to it, there's really no card that fits what I'm looking for. I want a card that does the following:

  • Runs multi-monitor (Eyefinity, 3D Surround) games with high IQ without hitting the framebuffer (1GB+ VRAM)
  • Does not require the use of Displayport; adapters are ok, but not preferable
  • Runs within reasonable sound and power thresholds
The 5870 E6 won't work for me due to ATI's insistance to require Displayport; the 480 is a power hog, hot and noisy. Essentially, I'm looking for a 5870 2GB version.
 
fatboy32 said:
I would have to give ATI/AMD a lot of credit about not letting the true capabilities of 5800 series cards out to Nvidia. I think Nvidia was definitely caught off guard and had to ramp up performance of fermi at the cost of power and temperature. All of which doesn't help Nvidia, hopefully Nvidia can do a die shrink and get those temps down, Damn those temps were high:eek::eek:.
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This is strangely reminiscent of our vacuum series er.. FX 5900 ULTRA series. Not nearly as bad however, im predicting a step forward in <6 months, as this is introductory hardware.
 
harmattan said:
I've been sitting back reading the reviews and comparing. I have two 480s on preorder and am going back and forth on whether I should cancel.

When it comes down to it, there's really no card that fits what I'm looking for. I want a card that does the following:

  • Runs multi-monitor (Eyefinity, 3D Surround) games with high IQ without hitting the framebuffer (1GB+ VRAM)
  • Does not require the use of Displayport; adapters are ok, but not preferable
  • Runs within reasonable sound and power thresholds
The 5870 E6 won't work for me due to ATI's insistance to require Displayport; the 480 is a power hog, hot and noisy. Essentially, I'm looking for a 5870 2GB version.
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That's a good analysis....pending the price.
 
dekruyter said:
That's a good analysis....pending the price.
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Price really isn't an object for me here. I'd pay good money for a card(s) that can run games multi-monitor full throttle.

I'm relatively sure nVidia will be taking there sweet time to get 3D Surround working. I know Kyle said it would be up-and-running, hopefully, in 30 days, but I'm not holding my breath. By forcing people to purchase two expensive cards to run multi-monitor, they've minimized the amount of people who will be running it. The less people looking at their cards for 3D Surround, the less nV will care about getting it out there.

Actually, do the 480/470 retail boxes advertise 3D Surround as a feature? That would be fucked if so, since it doesn't even work yet.
 
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I wonder what kind of temps I would see with a pair of the 480's in my current rig. My Stacker 830 has 4 large fans on the side blowing air into my case. When I have rivatuner run my single 295 GTX at 100% fan speed I get 39/40 degrees Celsius at idle and the two GPU's get to the lower 60's when under full load playing games like Metro 2033 and Crysis.

The power consumption doesn't bother me as much. I have a Thermaltake Toughpower 1200 and I live in Austin, Texas so I am used to high electric bills anyway heh.
 
Inu said:
This is strangely reminiscent of our vacuum series er.. FX 5900 ULTRA series. Not nearly as bad however, im predicting a step forward in <6 months, as this is introductory hardware.
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I owned an FX 5900 and the only thing reminicent here is the heat and noise level. Fermi does perform markedly better than it's competitor, the 5870, whereas the 5900 was destroyed by it's competition the 9700/9800.
 
is it me or there isn't any bfg cards based on fermi arch ? does this mean that bfg is really going with ati this time ?
 
Well so I read the review at about 2am this morning when I got back from a movie. And today read every reply on this thread. Sooooo what do I think about this Fermi? Well, I wouldn't say it's as bad as what the ATI HD 2900XT was, but it's close. I was really surprised at how loud it was. At least ATI's were bearable. Performance wise it was okay. Nothing spectacular. I left the review feeling pretty unimpressed, I still don't understand Nvidia's strategy with their bigger, hotter GPU's, when it's clearly proven to not work against ATI's strategy of smaller, more scalable GPU's. I don't know if it's somebody up at the top of the chain who is suborn as a mule and says "This is the way it's going to be" (which I have a feeling it is) or if Nvidia just still has a hangover from the 8800GTX days. Either way I think it's probably for Nvidia's CEO to resign, they haven't had anything compellingly convincing for the last 2 & 1/2 years.
 
Bedlam said:
Good review..personally it would take an act of god to get me to buy ATi hardware for my rig however..the last 3 cards I had from them were terrible. Ended up RMA'ing the same one twice...fan failures and burned up GPUs..wheeee. Fortunately nVidia has treated me well these last few years and I've never, ever, had to RMA one. Call me a fanboy if you want, even if the results for the fermi stuff arent quite as amazing as I'd like at launch, even though I'm due for a new video card..I still wont buy anything from ati.
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:rolleyes: I'm sure ATI is against you, better watch out!
 
eric66 said:
is it me or there isn't any bfg cards based on fermi arch ? does this mean that bfg is really going with ati this time ?
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XFX came aboard ATI with the 4890, so it's possible that BFG could do the same with the upcoming ATI refresh.
 
Thanks for the review. I'm disappointed but am hopeful that the refresh is coming sooner than later with many improvements. Kind of like what happened with the 280 to 285.
 
The release is a little lackluster, mainly just caught up to AMD/ATI's offering. Its not a bad card per-say, it just isn't a huge jump in performance over what we've been experiencing for some time now. Its definitely top dog though if you pair two of them up. Too bad, I was actually hoping the 480 would be a significant boost over my 5870, since I tend to favor Nvidia. 5870 would be my first AMD/ATI card, using Nvidia for as long as I could remember.. so any chance to go back to what I'm use to would be nice, plus Linux support for ATI is always a bit behind and hit-and-miss. Seems as though that isn't happening anytime soon.
 
XFX HD5850, paid $259, no tax

725mhz core ---> 900mhz core
1000mhz ddr5 ---> 1200mhz ddr5

470gtx, what?
 
1 said:
I am not trying to be confrontational, but isn't this being inconsistent? You review cpus and when you do, it is not just for games, right?
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I understand your needs here and your arguments. However, the fact of the matter is that GPGPU features are not deal breakers or even the reason a fraction of one percent of our readers are going to purchase a video card. The overwhelming majority of our readers are buying video cards to play games on. My goal in our content is to spend our resources satisfying our market.

To touch on Folding specifically, the [H]orde team members will do a better job than I ever could of keeping our readers up to date with what new GPUs will be impacting that space. Maybe not a quickly as we could, but certainly team #33 will do a better job communicating the meaningful results.

metalsmart said:
Kyle/Brent,

Between now and April 12th, do you think we'll get new announcements from either card manufacturer delivering either drivers, features, or new products?

The 12th is pretty close to what should be 10.4 release, but I'm wondering if ATI can live up to their promise, or if they'll want to compete for attention during this time. Any insight?

Nvidia will be pushing these two cards and I assume that no new features will be added until they've had some time on the market first since almost all value added features Nvidia is touting will also include the 2xx series. Are you able to make a guess on that?
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E6 card is coming. NV Surround is not going to make ship date. I talked to NV specifically about this and they told me that the drivers were not to the quality they wanted to launch with.

Nathen said:
Now Kyle i have only 1 question , I noticed on the Videos that you tested everything on an open platform , not in a close CASE. My question is ...how much (in terms of heat) hotter would having the setup be in a case be if any. 95 cel is DAM hot and that heat has to go somewhere no ?
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We tested in an 75F environment. You put those cards in a 95F chassis and they will get hot quicker and stay louder longer. After doing the videos I played FC2 for a while on the SLI setup. We used FurMark and it is synthetic. But in playing FC2, the cards got almost as loud. So the FurMark scenario is not misleading IMO. Putting them in a case, it is only going to be worse as far as how long the fans stay spun up. If anything, we went "easy" on them for the videos.

travbrad said:
Just FYI that dude is an Nvidia shill. I've seen him at at least a couple different tech sites now, and everything he says is anti-AMD or pro-Nvidia.
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We have learned to pick our battles. :)

Cobalt35 said:
Everyone who is saying that the drivers are new etc needs to realise that these cards were due out 6 months ago. nVidia has had 6 months to tweak the drivers. I don't think we'll be seeing any genuine miraculous speed increases from driver revisions.
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I have to agree with you on this, at least for the immediate future.

Michaelius said:
Will there be follow up with more games tested? 4 titles with no appless to apples part is rather dissapointing.
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We ran out of time to do A2A. We literally finished the review 10 minutes before publish time. Looking at the results we have, you will see that some of them pretty much A2A, but yes, we will go back and cover A2A in upcoming articles and reviews. We all need a rest this weekend though.

alg7_munif said:
Dear Kyle,

I would like to see these setup compared to each other:
Multi monitor: 2x HD 5870 vs. 2x GTX 480
$500 range: 2x HD 5850 vs GTX 480
$700 range: 2x GTX 470 vs HD 5970

Thanks.
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Yes, we will be covering some of this in the future for sure when NV surround hits.


Nathen said:
Id really like to see what the numbers are once this George Foreman grill (GTX 480) gets planted in a Case. Surely the temps might go up 1 or 2 degrees ?
What has not been mentioned is the proper Case that will be needed for this thing as Im not so sure you can just purchase and install this card in most any Case.


Kyle/Brent ? Any idea on that ?
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I dont think card temps will go up, the fans will just run faster longer. The 470 and 480 are dialed in to keep the GPU temp to 95C. Beyond that, the GPUs will throttle at 105C. Hot cases are not going to be the friend of Fermi. We have already seen Thermaltake launch a "Fermi certified" chassis. Still I have to think you have a good question. How hot can my case be before it is too hot to support Fermi? I will ask NV about intake temperature.

DrDoU said:
I don't know if this has been mentioned;why wasn't a Gulftown cpu used?
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Do you think we were finding CPU limitations in our review using a Core i7 LGA 1366 at 3.6GHz with 6GB of RAM?
 
wrangler said:
Bought my 5870 on launch day for $379 and I'm giggling like a school girl.

Early 5850 owners should be even happier than I am.

People who waited...

I feel sorry for you.
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Got my 5850 on launch day, this review puts a smile on my face :D
Posted via [H] Mobile Device
 
MrLonghair said:
Yes.
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How can they possibly get away with advertising 3D Surround on the retail box? It won't be ready when the cards are released. It's like advertising a car has headlights, but then the customer can't turn them on.
 
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