NVIDIA’s GeForce GTX 480 and GTX 470: 6 Months Late, Was It Worth the Wait?

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• Ryan Smith - Saturday, March 27, 2010 - link

  Yes, we did. We were running really close to the limits of our 850W Corsair unit. We measured the 480SLI at 900W, which after some power efficiency math comes out to around 750-800W actual load. At that load there's less extra space than we'd like to have.
  
  Just to add to that, we had originally been looking for a larger PSU after talking about PSU requirements with an NVNDIA partner, as the timing of this required we secure a new PSU before the cards arrived. So Antec had already shipped us their 1200W PSU before we could test the 850W, and we're glad since we would have been cutting it so close.

• bigboxes - Sunday, March 28, 2010 - link

  Appreciate the reply.

• GullLars - Saturday, March 27, 2010 - link

  OK, so 480 generally beats 5870, and 470 generally beats 5850, but at higher prices, temperatures, wattage, and noise levels. What about 5970?
  
  As far as i can tell, the 5970 beat or came even with 480 in all tests, draws less power, runs cooler, and makes less noise. The price isn't that much more either.
  
  It seems more fair to me to compare 480 with 5970 as both are the fastest single-card (as in PCIe slot) sollutions and are close in price and wattage.
  
  I would also like to see what framerate FPS games come in at with gamer settings (1680x1050 and 1920x1200 resolutions), and if average is higher than game cutoff or tickrate, what is the minimum FPS, and how much can you bump eyecandy before avg drops below cutoff/tickrate or minimum drops below acceptable (30).
  
  The reason for gamers sacraficing visuals to get high FPS can be summarized to game flow and latency. If FPS is below game tickrate, you get latency. For many games the tickrate is around 100 (100 updates in the game engine pr second). At 100 FPS you have 10ms latency between frames, if it drops to 50 you have 20 ms, and at 25 you have 40 ms. Lower than 25-30 FPS will obviously also result in virtually unplayable performance since aiming will becoming hard, so added latency from FPS below this becomes moot. If you are playing multiplayer games, this is added to the network latency. As most gamers know, latency below 30ms is generally desired, and above 50ms starts to matter, and above 100ms is very noticable. If you are on a bad connection (or have a bad connection to the server), 20-30ms added latency starts to matter even if it isn't visually notable.

• bigboxes - Saturday, March 27, 2010 - link

  Anyone else getting that message? I finally had to turn off the 'attack site' option in FF. It wasn't doing this last night. It's not doing it all over AT, just on the GTX 480 article.

• GullLars - Saturday, March 27, 2010 - link

  Here too, it listed among others googleanalytics.com as a hostile site.
  
  It was probebly because NVidia wasn't happy with the review XD
  (just joking ofc)

• chrisinedmonton - Saturday, March 27, 2010 - link

  Great article. Here's a small suggestion; temperature graphs should be normalised to room temperature rather than to 0C.

• GourdFreeMan - Sunday, March 28, 2010 - link

  I agree. Temperature graphs should either be normalized to the ambient environment or absolute zero; any other choice of basis is completely arbitrary.

• Ahmed0 - Saturday, March 27, 2010 - link

  Uh oh, my browser just got a heartwarming warning when I clicked on this article, the warning said that it might infect my computer badly and that I should definitely run home faster than my legs can carry.
  
  
  So, whats up with that?

• Lifted - Saturday, March 27, 2010 - link

  I just got that too. Had to disable the feature in Firefox.

• NJoy - Saturday, March 27, 2010 - link

  well, Charlie was semi-accurate, but quite right =))What a hot chick... I mean, literately hot. Way too hot