Rare GeForce GTX 480 With 512 CUDA Cores Emerges 10 Years Later

erek

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Anyone else into hardware collecting?

"Expreview's evaluation of the GeForce GTX 480 Core 512 shows a roughly 6% performance uplift over the regular GeForce GTX 480. The puny improvement comes at a very high cost, though: Back in the day, our test system consumed up to 450W when we pushed the GeForce GTX 480 to the edge. Expreview's system with the GeForce GTX 480 Core 512 pulled up to 644W under similar workloads, a difference of 194W.

It's easy to see why Nvidia didn't release the GeForce GTX 480 Core 512 when you look at the math. A 6% performance increase at the cost of 43.1% higher power consumption would have only given the Fermi-based graphics card a worse reputation for high power draw."


https://www.tomshardware.com/news/r...-cuda-cores-emerges-10-years-later-pulls-644w
 
Lmao!

I remember running 480’s in SLI right when they came out. Literally no need for room heater.

i remember my right leg just feeling like it was in an oven while gaming lmao
 
Didn't have a 480, but I did run 470 SLI (my first SLI system) so I could play Alice Madness Returns with PhysX enabled in Nvidia 3D Vision.

Fun times.
 
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Ahhh I remember running 3 of these in SLI.....Talk about a power hog!

Finally, a justification for buying a 1500w PSU!


It wouldn't surprise me if those are engineering samples . Otherwise, why would we see a 50% increase in power consumption for 6% more unit?

The 15% performance increase (and power reduction) with the GTX 580 required vastly better yields to accomplish, not something you were going to see at launch.

Even the venerated HD 5870/5850 had issues on that shitty 40nm process node. You coudn't find the things at less than $100 over MSRP for the first 12 months of availability. That is why I went with a 460 instead of a 5850 to replace my 4850 (the 5850 was still $300 when the 460 released for $230).

Thanks to the increadible yields, I was able to overclock my 460 1gb 25% out of the box (stock voltage). This made it the same speed as an overclocked 5850, at the cost of 40 extra watts during games.

That magical launch price of $260 for the 5850 was simply impossible.
 
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Didn't have a 480, but I did run 470 SLI (my first SLI system) so I could play Alice Madness Returns with PhysX enabled in Nvidia 3D Vision.

Fun times.

My onliest game on Origin. Well, technically, my wife's account.
 
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Damn, has it been a decade already?
Seems like 2010 was only a few years ago...

I remember the GTX 480, while being a room heater, was quite the GPGPU for the time, with ~1.3 TFLOPS FP32 of compute capabilities.
Running just one was able to heat my whole place back then.
 
I vaguely remember there was a rumor this chip existed way back in the day, but there wasn't much interest since power draw would be so high and the 580 (and 485m) was released soon after.

I had three GTX 480s running in tri-SLI in 2010. I had two of them running on an Enermax 1000w and the third ran off a 350w front-seat PSU. Powerful setup for the time, but I recall my room would become a furnace after 10 minutes gaming, and it would periodically trip a fuse.
 
It's interesting to think about. Before this card and even a bit after, the focus was on more performance, power consumption be damned! I think many of us remember the voodoo 5 6000 that never hit the market.... required an external power adapter.

Now we've pushed the silicon so hard that the power consumption is all important. Saving electricity is nice, but I don't think anyone here wants a flagship card that pulls over 500W under load. I'm not even sure that would be possible given the temps.

I'm just commenting on how much the shift in design has been towards efficiency. Early GeForce cards really didn't take that into consideration. Neither did ATI but to a lesser degree. At least they tried to make things more efficient even in only what they were able to with the technology at the time.
 
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