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
Meet the GTX 480 and GTX 470, Cont
Moving beyond the GF100 GPU itself, we have the boards. With NVIDIA once more forgoing a power-of-two sized memory bus on their leading part, the number of memory chips and the total memory size of the GTX 400 series is once again an odd amount. On the GTX 480 there are 12 128MB GDDR5 memory chips for a total of 1536MB of VRAM, while the GTX 470 has 10 chips for a total of 1280MB. This marks the first big expansion in memory capacity we’ve seen out of NVIDIA in quite some time; after introducing the 8800GTX in 2006 with 768MB of RAM, we haven’t seen them do anything besides bump up 256-bit/512-bit memory bus parts to 1GB over the years. And with 256MB GDDR5 due in volume later this year, we wouldn’t be surprised to see NVIDIA push a 3GB part before the year is out.
Meanwhile in a stark difference from the GTX 200 series, the GTX 400 series does not share a common design and cooler. This leads to the GTX 480 and GTX 470 being remarkably different cards. The GTX 470 is essentially a slight variation on the GTX 200 series design, utilizing a similar fully shrouded design as those cards. Meanwhile the GTX 480 is positively alien coming from the GTX 200 series in two distinct ways. The first is the 4 heatpipes from the top of the card (with a 5th one staying within the card), and the second is the fully exposed heatsink grill on the front of the card. That’s exactly what it looks like folks – that’s the top of the heatsink on the GTX 480. At this point it’s mostly an intellectual curiosity (we have no idea whether it makes the GTX 480’s cooler all that better) but we did learn the hard way that it’s not just cosmetic, it can get very hot.
One new thing that both cards do share in common is that the shroud is no longer a single large device; on the GTX 480 and GTX 470 the top of the shroud can be snapped on and off, allowing easy access to the heatsink and fan assemblies. We can’t imagine that most users will ever want to remove the top of the shroud, but this is one of the cooler design elements we’ve seen in a video card in recent years. It’ll be interesting to see if this proves to be beneficial for aftermarket coolers, as this should make installation/uninstallation much more expedient.
One other common element between the cards is that they have a cut-out PCB for pulling in air both from the front side and the back side of the card. We’ve seen this before on the GTX 295, but this is the first time we’ve seen this design element on a single-GPU card.
For those of you working with cramped cases, you should find these cards to be a pleasant surprise. The GTX 470 is 9.5”, making it the same length as the Radeon 5850 (or nearly 1” shorter than the GTX 200 series). On the other hand the GTX 480 measures 10.5”, which is ever so slightly longer than the GTX 200 series which we measure at 10.45”. We’re also happy to report that NVIDIA put the PCIe power plugs on the top of both cards, rather than on the rear of the card as AMD did on the Radeon 5850. Practically speaking, both of these cards should fit in to a wider array cases than AMD’s respective cards.
Even though these cards will fit in to smaller cases though, airflow will be paramount due to the high TDP of these cards. NVIDIA’s own reviewers guide even goes so far as to recommend spacing your cards out as far as possible for SLI use. This actually isn’t a bad idea no matter what cards are involved since it ensure neither card is restricted by the other, however given that not every board with a 3rd PCIe x16 slot offers full bandwidth to that slot, it’s not a practical suggestion for all cases. If you can’t separate your cards, you’re going to want great airflow instead, such as putting a fan directly behind the cards.
Up next is the port layout of the GTX 400 series. Unlike AMD, NVIDIA’s TDP is too high here to go with a half-slot vent here, so NVIDIA is limited to what ports they can fit on a single full slot. In this case their reference design is a pair of DVI ports and a mini-HDMI port (this being the first cards with that port in our labs). Bear in mind that GF100 doesn’t have the ability to drive 3 displays with a single card, so while there are 3 DVI-type outputs here, you can only have two at once.
After having seen DisplayPort on virtually every AMD card in our labs, we were caught a bit off guard by the fact that NVIDIA didn’t do the same and go with something like a mini-DisplayPort here for a 2x DVI + 1x mini-DP configuration like we’ve seen on the Radeon 5970. NVIDIA tells us that while they could do such a thing, their market research has shown that even their high-end customers are more likely to purchase a monitor with HDMI than with DP, hence the decision to go with mini-HDMI. This is somewhat academic since DVI can easily be converted to HDMI, but this allows NVIDIA’s partners to skip the dongles and makes it easier to do audio pass-through for monitors with built-in speakers.
Speaking of audio, let’s quickly discuss the audio/video capabilities of the GTX 400 series. GF100 has the same audio/video capabilities as the 40nm GT 200 series launched late last year, so this means NVIDIA’s VP4 for video decoding (H.264/MPEG-2/VC-1/MPEG-4 ASP) and internal passthrough for audio. Unfortunately the latter means that the GTX 400 series (and other first-generation Fermi derivatives) won’t be able to match AMD’s Radeon 5000 series in audio capabilities – NVIDIA can do compressed lossy audio(DD/DTS) and 8 channel uncompressed LPCM, but not lossless compressed audio formats such as DTS-HD and Dolby TrueHD. This leaves the HTPC crown safely in AMD’s hands for now.
Finally we have bad news: availability. This is a paper launch; while NVIDIA is launching today, the cards won’t be available for another two and a half weeks at a minimum. NVIDIA tells us that the cards are expected to reach retailers on the week of April 12th, which hopefully means the start of that week and not the end of it. In either case we have to chastise NVIDIA for this; they’ve managed to have hard launches in the past without an issue, so we know they can do better than this. This is a very bad habit to get in to.
Once these cards do go on sale, NVIDIA is telling us that the actual launch supply is going to be in the tens-of-thousands of units. How many tens-of-thousands? We have no idea. For the sake of comparison AMD had around 30,000 units for the 5800 series launch, and those were snapped up in an instant. We don’t think NVIDIA’s cards will sell quite as quickly due to the pricing and the fact that there’s viable competition for this launch, but it’s possible to have tens-of-thousands of units and still sell out in a heartbeat. This is something we’ll be watching intently in a couple of weeks.
The availability situation also has us concerned about card prices. NVIDIA is already starting off behind AMD in terms of pricing flexibility; 500mm3+ dies and 1.5GB of RAM does not come cheap. If NVIDIA does manage to sell the GTX 400 series as fast as they can send cards out then there’s a good chance there will be a price hike. AMD is in no rush to lower prices and NVIDIA’s higher costs mean that if they can get a higher price they should go for it. With everything we’ve seen from NVIDIA and AMD, we’re not ready to rule out any kind of price hike, or to count on any kind of price war.
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ol1bit - Thursday, April 1, 2010 - link
I thought it was a fare review. They talked about the heat issues, etc.You can't compare a 2 GPU card to a single GPU card. If they ever make a 2 core GF100, I'm sure Anandtech will do a review.
IceDread - Tuesday, April 6, 2010 - link
You are wrong. You can and you should compare single gpu cards with multi gpu cards. It does not matter if a card has one or 30 gpu's on the card. It's the performance / price that matters.These nvidia cards are very expensive in performance / price compared to the ATI cards, simple as that. It's obvious that nvidia dropped the ball with their new flagship. You even need 2 cards to be able to use 3 screens.
This is bad for us customers, we are not getting any price pressure at all. These nvidia cards does not improve the market since they can not compete with the ATI card, only nvidia fans will purchase these cards or possibly some working with graphics.
I hope nvidia will do better with their next series or cards and I hope that won't take to long because ATI will most likely release a new series in half a year or so.
xxtypersxx - Sunday, March 28, 2010 - link
I will be interested in seeing the performance gains that will likely come from revised Nvidia drivers in a month or two. In some of the tests the gtx470 is trading blows with the gtx285 despite having nearly double the compute power...I think there is a lot of room for optimization.I am no fanboy and even owned a 4850 for a while, but Nvidia's drivers have always been a big decision factor for me. I don't get any of the random issues that were common on catalyst and aside from the occasional hiccup (196.67 G92 fan bug) I don't worry about upgrades breaking things. I admit I don't know if all the 5xxx series driver issues have been fixed yet but I do look forward to driver parity, until then I think raw performance is only part of the equation.
GourdFreeMan - Sunday, March 28, 2010 - link
Ryan, have you checked performance and/or clocks to see if any of the cards you are testing are throttling under FurMark? I recall you mentioning in your 58xx review that ATi cards can throttle under FurMark to prevent damage, and while most of the power numbers look normal, I notice a few of the cards are consuming less power under FurMark than Crysis, unlike the majority of the cards which consume considerably more power running FurMark than Crysis...MojaMonkey - Sunday, March 28, 2010 - link
I can turn off one light in my house and remove the power consumption difference between the GTX480 and the 5870.I thought this was an enthusiast site?
I lol irl when people talk about saving 100 watts and buying a 5870. So saving 100 watts but building a 700 watt system? Are you saving the planet or something?
I think nVidia is smart, if you fold or use cuda or need real time 3d performance from a quadro you will buy this card. That probably is a large enough market for a niche high end product like this.
PS: 5870 is the best gaming card for the money!
Paladin1211 - Sunday, March 28, 2010 - link
No, the 5850 is.p/s: I misclicked the Report instead of Reply button, so pls ignore it T_T
kallogan - Sunday, March 28, 2010 - link
Seriously i wonder who'd want gpus that power angry, noisy and hot...Nvidia is out both on mobile and desktop market...The only pro for Nvidia i can see is the 3D support.beginner99 - Sunday, March 28, 2010 - link
This is kind of bad for consumers. 0 pressure on ATI to do anything from lower price to anything else. they can just lay back and work on the next gen.Well, that at least made my decision easy. build now or wait for sandybridge. I will wait. hoepfully gpu marekt will be nicer then too (hard to be worse actually).
C5Rftw - Sunday, March 28, 2010 - link
I was waiting for the fermi cards to come out before my next high end build( looking for price drops), but I actually did not expect this card to be this fast. The GTX480 is ~15% faster than the 5870, but for $100 more, and it is just gonna be a Nvidia loyal card, and the 5870 will probably drop just a little if at all.. The 5850 and and 5830 should drop $25-50, hopefully more(2x5850 at ~250$ each would be FTW). Now, would I like to have a fermi?, well yeah for sure, but I would much rather have a 5870 and down the road add another. A GTX 480 uses the same, if not more power than (2) 5870's. Now this reminds me of the last gen of the P4's. or as we know em, the Preshots. Basically, Nvidia's idea of a huge chip approach, with yes impressive performance, was just the wrong approach. I mean, their next-gen, if based on this same "doubling" SPs, cuda cores, would draw 300w+ easily and almost require water cooling because the next TSMC process is going to be 32nm and that will not allow them to "cut the chip in half." ATI's theory started with the 4000 series has proven to be a much better/efficient design. I think they could make a 6870 using 40nm TSMC right now, but ofcourse it would be a hot chip. Now when they get the 32 TSMC FABs running, Nvidia has got to re-design their chips.. And with how hot the GTX 480 is, I dont see how they could make a GTX 495. Also, the 5890 is right around the corner and that should give the final punch to KO Nvidia in this GPU generation. On a side note, Thank " " that there is some healthy competion or AMD might pull what Nvidia did and rebrand the 8800 5 or 6 times.Belard - Sunday, March 28, 2010 - link
Keep in mind, the GeForce 480 (GTX means nothing, see any GTX210 or GT 285?) is already the most power hungry card on the market, just under 300watts under full load.... if the GF480 had all 512 Cuda Cores running and clocked higher... the card will easily surpass 300watts!This in turn means MORE heat, more power, more noise. There are videos on the 480/470s & ATI cards... the 480's fan is running very fast and loud to keep it under 100c, about 2~3 times hotter than a typical CPU.
We will see the ATI 6000 series on 40nm, but it may not be with TSMC.
If the upcoming 5890 is 15% faster and can sell for $400~450, that would put some hurt on the GF480.
Not sure how/why ATI would do re-branding. The 4670 is almost like a 3870, but is easily a more advanced and cheaper GPU. The bottom end GPUs have all changed. 2400 / 3450, 4350, 5450 - all different.
Nvidia has been doing re-branding for quite a long time. The GF2mx was re-branded as the GF2MX 400 (These were bottom end $150~190 cards in 2001) and then for some bone-head reason, during the GF6 era - they brought back the GF2MX but added DX8. Huh? Add a function to an OLD bottom end GPU?
The GF2-TI came out when GF3-TI series was launched... they wanted "TI" branding. The GF2-TI was a rebranded GF2-Pro with a slight clock upgrade.
Then came the first big-branding/feature fiasco with Nvidia. The GF8 was the first DX8 cards. Then the GF 4 series came out. The GF4ti were the high end models. But the MX series were nothing more than GF2 (DX7) with optional DVI... to take care of the low end and shove the letter names to the front.
GF4 mx420 = GF2mx, but a bit slower.
GF4 mx440 = GF2 Pro/TI
GF4 mx460 = ... faster DX7 card, but it was about $20~35 cheaper than the GF4-TI4200, a DX8 card. The Ti4200 was a #1 seller at about $200. Some of the 440se & 8x models may have 64 or 128bit RAM... ugh.
Then they had fun with the TI series when AGP 8x came out... NEW models! Either thou the cards couldn't max out the AGP 4x bus. Even the future ATI 9800Pro only ran 1~3% faster with AGP 8x.
GF4 Ti 4200 > GF4 Ti 4200 8x
GF4 Ti 4400 > GF4 Ti 4800 SE
GF4 Ti 4600 > GF4 Ti 4800
Yep, same GPUs... new names. Some people would upgrade to nothing or worse. Some even went from the 4600 to the 4800SE which was a downgrade!
GF5 5500 = 5200
Since the GF5... er "FX" series, Nvidia kept the DX# and feature set within the series. All GF5 cards are DX9.
But the 5200s were a joke. By the time they hit the market at $120, the Ti4200s were also $120 and the 4mx were reduced to $30~60. But the 5200 was HALF the performance of a 4200. People actually thought they were upgrading... returns happened.
Funny thing once. A person bought a "5200" at walmart and was confused by the POST display of "4200". Luckily he had posted to us on the interent. We laughed our butts off...! What happened? Batch & switch... someone bought a 5200, took it home - switched cards, took it back to Walmart for a refund. hey, its usually a brick or a dead card, etc. he got used card, but a much better product.
Like the ATI 5450 is too slow for gaming today for DX11, the GF5200 was horrible back in 2003 for DX9! The 5200 is still sold today, the only thing left.
Pretty much the entire GF5 series was utter garbage. 4 versions of the GF5600 ($150~200) were slower than the previous $100 Ti 4200. It was sick. This allowed ATI to gain respect and marketshare with their ATI 9600 & 9700 cards. The GF 5700 series (2 out of 5 types) were good Ti4200 replacements. The 5900 went up against the ATI 9800. I've owned both.
Since then, ATI pretty much had the upper hand in performance throughout the GF6 & GF7 era. AMD buys out ATI, then the GF8 and core2 wipes out ATI/AMD with faster products.
While ATI had the faster cards during DX9.0c (really MS? Couldn't make 6.1, 6.2?) era over the GF6/7... Nvidia *HAD* the lower end market. The GF6600 and 7600GT were $150~200 products... ATI products in that price range were either too slow or cost too much.
With GF 8800 & 8600s, ATI had lost high & mid-range markets. The HD 2000 series = too expensive, too hot and not fast enough... (sound familiar). The ATI 3000 series brought ATI back to competitive position where it counted. Meanwhile, Nvidia milked the G92~96 for the past 2+ years. They are code-name & model number crazy happy.
As long as ATI continues doing engineering and management this way, nVidia will continue to be in trouble for a long time unless they get their act together or count on the server market to stay in business.
End of short history lesson :0