NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 480 finally unleashed. Reviewed and rated.

[SuGaR847]

The review just makes me want to pick a 5870 instead...

[Fraz]

From me or from Nvidia??

From you! (although I suppose both is true as well).

You're normally so enthusiastic about graphics cards you can't help but use lots of exclamation marks!!

PS: !!!

[keasla]

me just ordered an asus one now from scan

http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/1536M...-DVI-mini-HDMI

[nibbler]

I'm unsure if it warrants a £150~ premium over the HD5870.

Let me clear it up for you. No. All it does is add to playable framerates. There's pretty much nothing on the market that a 5870 can't handle

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

From you! (although I suppose both is true as well).

You're normally so enthusiastic about graphics cards you can't help but use lots of exclamation marks!!

PS: !!!

[jim]

£450...

£200 for a 5850 seemed too extravagant to me.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

The GTX470 does not seem to do very well against the HD5870 1GB:

http://www.hardocp.com/article/2010/...0_sli_review/3

[sammorris]

Indeed. Considering the typical nvidia bias from different games and ATI in others, the GTX470/HD5850 and GTX480/HD5870 are rivals in exactly the same way the HD4870/GTX260 and HD4850/GTS250 are.

[borandi]

Nvidia GTX480 vs ATi 5870
Intel Pentium 4 vs AMD X2 s939

Ring any comparisons?

[sammorris]

A little bit, but the P4s vs Athlons was only 130W vs 95W, this is more like 250W vs 150W. It's worse. That, and the Pentium Ds were ROFL cheap.

[chis]

Nvidia deserve a minor lambasting for the delays and ultimately releasing a power-hungry, dangerously hot-running monstrosity of a card that might not be quite the disappointment the "FX" series, but is still not even close to worth the asking price.

Hilariously underwhelming. Though the power chart made me laugh...

[sammorris]

http://www.hardocp.com/article/2010/...0_sli_review/7

Have a listen.
And turn your headphones down.
RIGHT DOWN.

[Jimbo75]

Guys read the tomshardware and hardocp reviews too. The way they see it, it's bad news for nVidia.

Tarinder did a nice review here, but it's a little bit more nVidia friendly than the US reviews.

[sammorris]

To be fair, nvidia have the Quadro range to prop them up, along with all the low grade cards like the GTS250 and GT240, which don't fail anywhere near as badly, yet comprise far more of nvidia's revenue. The only tragedy is all this R&D expenditure has resulted in dogmess with a heatsink attached.

[Hicks12]

I read through it and thought it wasnt as bad as i expected and it fits inbetween the 5970 and 5870 but its no inconsistant on if it beats the 5870 so the pricing should come down. I did think that doing a 5850xfire would be the best competitor as it is a similar price (as someone mentioned its actually £449 at scan when xfire is same price).

I looked for a hexus multi gpu benchmark and these were from the highest res, power draw is edited by just comparing the change of other gpu's (the system is the same bar different mobo i think however that affected power draw ). These are also done on 9.9 cat, so 10.3 would see A BIG improvement .

HAWKX

5850 xfire= 83
GTX 480 =80

Crysis (i assume the hexus review i read meant crysis warhead)
5850 xfire= 20.8
GTX 480 = 16.83

Farcry 2
5850 xfire= 86.1
GTX 480= 74.61


Power draw

IDLE
5850 xfire= 131w
GTX 480 =152w

Load
5850 xfire= 394w
GTX 480 = 475w

Temp
IDLE
5850 xfire= 38C
GTX 480= 42C

Load
5850 xfire= 67C
GTX 480= 92C

Ambient to load difference
5850 xfire= 46C
GTX 480= ?C
Now after looking at that i have to say that the 480 is a crap card... it uses more power provides less performance is like 6months newer has a bloody big cooler thats loud cools worse than a crossfire setup and costs the same!!!. AMD will probably have their gpu's out by Christmas so this will be superceeded yet again.

Also AMD could cut their pricing by like 10% easily i bet, would make Xfire even better .

PS: Sorry for bad typing, keyboard is broken and MS have sent replacement. Also theres probably mistakes somewhere so feel free to correct it.


PPS@Hexus Do a 5850 crossfire review with the exact system and newer drivers, if you do that would be great .

[sammorris]

HAEX was bugged on the HD5 series, it's not a proper test. The GTX480s fare much worse in normal games than they do in HAWX.