NVIDIA’s GeForce GTX 480 and GTX 470: 6 Months Late, Was It Worth the Wait?
by Ryan Smith on March 26, 2010 7:00 PM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
The Test
With the launch of the GTX 400 series, we have gone ahead and completely rebuilt our benchmark suite. This includes rotating out several games for several new games, giving us a nice mix of DX9/10 and DX11 games. Everything else has been rebenchmarked using the latest drivers, and our power data has changed as we installed an Antec 1200W PSUin order to keep up with the potential power demands of a pair of GTX 480s in SLI.
For the AMD cards, we used AMD’s Catalyst 10.3a drivers along with the latest driver profile update. For NVIDIA’s cards NVIDIA supplied us with their Forceware 197.17 drivers, which only work for the GTX 400 series. For the rest of the NVIDIA cards we used the 197.13 drivers.
| CPU: | Intel Core i7-920 @ 3.33GHz |
| Motherboard: | Intel DX58SO (Intel X58) |
| Chipset Drivers: | Intel 9.1.1.1015 (Intel) |
| Hard Disk: | OCZ Summit (120GB) |
| Memory: | Patriot Viper DDR3-1333 3 x 2GB (7-7-7-20) |
| Video Cards: |
AMD Radeon HD 5970 AMD Radeon HD 5870 AMD Radeon HD 5850 AMD Radeon HD 5830 AMD Radeon HD 5770 AMD Radeon HD 5750 AMD Radeon HD 4890 AMD Radeon HD 4870 1GB AMD Radeon HD 4850 AMD Radeon HD 3870 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 480 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 470 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 295 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 285 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 275 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 260 Core 216 NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT |
| Video Drivers: |
NVIDIA ForceWare 197.13 NVIDIA ForceWare 197.17 AMD Catalyst 10.3a |
| OS: | Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit |
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
196 Comments
View All Comments
palladium - Saturday, March 27, 2010 - link
clock for clock, the 920 is faster than the 860 thanks to its triple channel memory - the 860 is faster because of its aggressive turbo mode. X58 is definitely the route to go, espeacially if you're benchmarking SLI/CF setups (dual PCIe x16).randfee - Sunday, March 28, 2010 - link
go ahead and try Crysis with 3,33GHz and 4,x, minimum fps scale strangely with the CPU.palladium - Saturday, March 27, 2010 - link
shit double post, srypalladium - Saturday, March 27, 2010 - link
Clock for clock, the 920 is faster than the 860 (860 is faster because of its aggressive turbo mode). Using the P55/860 would limit cards to PCIe x8 bandwidth when benchmarking SLI/CF (unless of course you get a board with nF200 chip), which can be more significant (espeacially with high-end cards) than a OC-ing a CPU from 3.33GHz to 4GHz.Roland00 - Saturday, March 27, 2010 - link
It doesn't really add to the framerates, and having a 4ghz cpu could in theory bring stability issues.http://www.legionhardware.com/articles_pages/cpu_s...">http://www.legionhardware.com/articles_...scaling_...
B3an - Friday, March 26, 2010 - link
You're good at making yourself look stupid.A 920 will reach 4GHz easy. I've got one to 4.6GHz. And a 920 is for the superior X58 platform and will have Tri-Channel memory.
Makaveli - Friday, March 26, 2010 - link
I have to agree with that guy.Your post is silly everyone knows the X58 platform is the superior chipset in the intel line up. Secondly do you honestly think 3.33Ghz vs 4Ghz is going to make that much of a difference at those high resolutions?
randfee - Friday, March 26, 2010 - link
sorry guys but I know what I'm talking about, using Crysis for instance, I found that minimum fps scale quite nicely with CPU clock whereas the difference a quad core makes is not so big (only 2 threads in the game afaik). FarCry 2, huge improvements with higher end (=clocked) cpus. The Core i7 platform has a clear advantage, yes, but the clock counts quite a bit.As I said... no offense intended and no, not arguing against my favorite site anandtech ;). Just stating what I and others have observed. I'd just always try and minimize other possible bottlenecks.
randfee - Friday, March 26, 2010 - link
well.... why not test using the 920 @ 4.xGHz, why possibly bottleneck the System at the CPU by using "only" 3,3?No offense intended but I find it a valid question. Some games really are CPU bound, even at high settings.
Ph0b0s - Friday, March 26, 2010 - link
These new cards from ATI and Nvidia are very nice and for a new PC build it is a no brainer, to pick up one of these cards. But for those like me with decent cards from the last generation (GTX285 SLI) I don't really feel a lot of pressure to upgrade.Most current PC games are Directx 9 360 ports that last gen cards can handle quite well. Even Directx 10 games are not too slow. The real driver for these cards are Directx 11 games, the amount of which I can count on one hand and not very many upcomming.
Those that are out don't really bring much over DX10 so I don't really feel like I am missing anything yet. I think Crysis 2 may change this, but by it's release date there will probably be updated / shrunk versions of these new GPU's avaliable.
Hence why Nvidia and ATI need really ecstatic reviews to convince us to buy their new cards when there is not a lot of software that (in my opinion) really needs them.