Reviews - NVIDIA GeForce GTX 470 1,280MB review. Fermi done right?

[HEXUS]

We investigate the qualities of the other GeForce 400-series card launched last Friday. Read on to find out.

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[TooNice]

That's consistent with most reviews I've seen. Performance wise, it's not bad at all, sitting between the 5870 and 5850. But it's still too hot (and therefore, noisy), and as far as the UK is concerned, still not great value (having said that, can you really find the 5850 for £225 inc, in stock?).

[Brewster0101]

Been a good few games for AMD/ATI.

ATI's GPU's are not over shadowed by Nvidia's new GPUs and AMD releases the first 12 core CPU...

All good for the troubled company.

[Tarinder]

We had a scout around for pricing and found a few near that price.

The best of the bunch, at least as far as specifications are concered, is the PowerColor pre-overclocked HD 5850 (760MHz/4,200MHz) for £228 delivered:

http://www.ebuyer.com/product/199769

[Terbinator]

Been a good few games for AMD/ATI.

ATI's GPU's are not over shadowed by Nvidia's new GPUs and AMD releases the first 12 core CPU...

All good for the troubled company.

Doesnt that 12 core CPU get beat out by Intel's 6(8?) though ?

[Repressor]

Cheers! (TS)

I would also like to know the temperatures of that 700MHz overclocked card

[Georgy291]

right my lungs are getting tired of laughing so hard at nvidias joke.

i see it does nicely in tessalation, but how many games actually use that?

[Jimbo75]

Doesnt that 12 core CPU get beat out by Intel's 6(8?) though ?

No, but the 6 cores beat it in applications that cant use the maximum cores Magny Cours allows.

In sheer power Magny Cours simply thrashes the best Xeons, you cannot beat 12 cores with 6 it really is that simple. Magny Cours is too powerful for a lot of software still though, so the Xeon's win in core limited situations.

[Terbinator]

Which ones (Intel CPU) are used in the latest Anandtech review ?

The beancounters will probably point out that AMD’s strategy of bolting two CPU dies at 346 mm² together is quite costly. But this is the server CPU market, margins are quite a bit higher. Let AMD worry about the issue of margins. If AMD is willing to sell us - IT professionals - two CPUs for the price of one, we will not complain. It means that the fierce competitive market is favoring the customer. The bottom line is: is this twelve-core Opteron a good deal? For users waiting to use it in a workstation we have our doubts. You’ll benefit from the extra cores when rendering complex scenes, but in all other scenarios (quick simple rendering, modeling) the higher clocked and higher IPC Xeon X5600 series is simply the better choice.

Applications based on transactional databases (OLTP and ERP) are also better off with new Xeon. The SAP and our own Oracle Calling Circle benchmark all point in the same direction. Intel has a tangible performance advantage in both benchmarks.

Data mining applications clearly benefit from having “real” instead of “logical” cores. For datamining, we believe the 12-core Opteron is the clear winner. It offers 20% better performance at 20% lower prices, a good deal if you ask us. Intel’s relatively high prices for its six-core are challenged. The increased competition turns this into a buyers market again.

And then there is the most important segment: the virtualization market. We estimate that the new Opteron 6174 is about 20% slower than the Xeon 5670 in virtualized servers with very high VM counts. The difference is a lot smaller in the opposite scenario: a virtualized server with a few very heavy VMs. Here the choice is less clear. At this point, we believe both server CPUs consume about the same power, so that does not help either to make up our minds. It will depend on how the OEMs price their servers. The Opteron 6100 series offers up to 24 DIMMs slots, the Xeon is “limited” to 18. In many cases this allows the server buyer to achieve higher amount of memory with lower costs. You can go for 96 GB of memory with affordable 4 GB DIMMs, while the Intel server is limited to 72 GB there. That is a small bonus for the AMD server.

The HPC market seems to favor AMD once again. AMD holds only a small performance advantage, and this market is very cost sensitive. The lower price will probably convince the HPC people to go for the AMD based servers.

All in all, this is good news for the IT professional that is a hardware enthusiast. Profiling your application and matching it to the right server CPU pays off and that is exactly what set us apart from the average IT professional.

Not an all out victory then for the 12 cores. I would imagine the VM market to be one that can make the most of logical processors.

[Jimbo75]

Sure there are situations where the Xeons are superior, but mostly it's artificial, ie it has been specifically coded for SMT use or isn't using cores past 6/8/16 or whatever.

MC is a bit of a minor miracle. In all honesty, I think most of us are looking at it with disbelief today.

[kalniel]

Another good review Tarinder - especially appreciate the willingness you've shown to respond to suggestions and the tests just keep improving! I love the amount of data in this one, and there are some really interesting trends that are beginning to be seen - medium resolution performance vs higher resolution, framebuffer size effects (crysis ) and everything.

Testing the power, temperature and sound at the peak usage scene in BC2 is a really great idea too - absolutely real-world relevant and some fairly startling results that might be overlooked if one was just looking at the headline fps/cost figures.

[Domestic_Ginger]

As above I have to agree a good review with good thermal investigation. The photoshop spray canning of the cuda cores looks a bit like vandalism though!

Wondering why the are did not plan on a 416 (or even less perhaps 256) model as the performance differnece between the 470 to 480 is not massive. I no expert but this would have allowed for higher yields again and cards to fill more price points (specifically the 5850 £200 mark).

I know its NV marketing strategy to get the best card out and then work from there (usually with rebrands these days) but would have helped to make a more competitive fist of it against the 5000s.

[kalniel]

Wondering why the are did not plan on a 416 (or even less perhaps 256) model as the performance differnece between the 470 to 480 is not massive. I no expert but this would have allowed for higher yields again and cards to fill more price points (specifically the 5850 £200 mark).

I guess there's a limit to how much cutting down on units improves the yields - at some point if you've got more than a certain number of faults you're probably going to see them in areas that affect the card's functionality in a way that can't be stabilised just by shutting down cores.

And perhaps these things are just so expensive that it doesn't make sense to sell even a fault binned chip below a certain price - I don't know how the fab industry works though - who pays for faulty chips?

[slickric21]

Thanks for the great review.

Good to see some very 'friendly on the eye' graphs that allow quick comparison between all the main contenders at the moment incl the HD 5870 2gb due for release soon !!!!

[Domestic_Ginger]

And perhaps these things are just so expensive that it doesn't make sense to sell even a fault binned chip below a certain price - I don't know how the fab industry works though - who pays for faulty chips?

I don't really understand how it works but i'm sure they have not discarded the faulty chips at the reported price they are making them for. Perhaps a la 5830 bulk sale will happen.

[jim]

Just wait. My money is on:

GTS 250 --> GT 430
GTX 260 --> GTS 440
GTX 285 --> GTS 450
Broken fermi --> GTX 460
GTX 470
GTX 480