Reviews - NVIDIA GeForce GTX 480 vs. AMD Radeon HD 5850 CrossFire - battle at £450

[sammorris]

Concrete evidence of what I keep telling people who love the GTX480 so much, with the exception of Crysis Warhead with 4xAA applied at 2560x1600 (irrelevant, as it's unplayable regardless, and this is only due to the game needing more than 1GB of GPU RAM) two 5850s are reliably, substantially better than one GTX480, and they still use less power and run cooler, both at idle and load. In a 3-slot spacing environment, they're probably still quieter too.

I'm going to try tackling PhysX on a new install when I swap my pair of 4870X2s for a 4GB HD5970, and stick a geforce in my second 16x slot, thinking about a GT240 or 9800GT, something in that region - hoping that's enough for 2560x1600. Would be willing to go up to a GTS250 if I can find one cheap, but that'd be about the limit. I'd ideally like to have a third GPU I can switch between hacked PhysX and tri-CF but I don't trust that sort of mod to be the least bit stable, and a third 5870, especially one with 2GB, which I'd really need to use, is a bit too pricey for my liking.

[Speed]

Nice review.

Although the table on page 12 appears to be off. The loaded wattages quoted don't match the values quoted in the graph near the top: http://www.hexus.net/content/item.ph...=24061&page=12

Unless they were taken from different tests?

[sammorris]

5% at PCIe 2.0 4x and 2% at PCIe 2.0 8x, yep that's pretty negligible. Glad I went i5 instead of i7 after I read that

[Xonar]

Having already bought a 5850 and found it to be a fantastic card, definately considering going crossfire after seeing these results. Seeing 5850's for as low as £199 kicking around now so to have that kind of performance for under £400 is pretty impressive.

[Bloke]

Does anyone have an idea how the 480 and 470 are selling, if they are selling at all? I see nothing but preorder stock levels on pretty much all etailers. Im thinking is there any point getting them in stock?

[sammorris]

First batches arrived at some stores on the 14th, then promptly sold out pretty sharpish. There were 470s in stock at a few places earlier this week, dunno if any are left. The GTX400 series' poor performance is matched only by its poor yields, so finding the cards is difficult.

[shaffaaf27]

performance isnt poor, just everythign else that comes with it is lol

[sammorris]

Performance is relative. For £450 the GTX480 is poor, for £350 it'd be reasonable, for £250 it'd be excellent.

[shaffaaf27]

no performance isnt relative. worth is relative, and they arnt worth the price for the performance, but performance is still there.

[sammorris]

Not exactly. The GTX480's performance is not excellent when compared to the HD5970, for example.

[shaffaaf27]

thats becuase thats a dual GPU card.

[sammorris]

and? You do surely see the issue with calling something's performance 'excellent' when it's barely any better than something costing only two third the price, and is far, far outclassed by something costing less than a quarter more.

[shaffaaf27]

i wouldnt say 10-15% is barely tbh. i never said its good for the price though did i. im talking raw numbers here not cost. performance is just numbers. and for that its a very good card. but considering price/heat/powerconsumption etc its a horrid card. but performance is still very good, esp for a single GPU.

[sammorris]

Not going into a lengthy debate, but pre-bias, it really isn't 10-15%, it's closer to 5-7%. Performance is indeed good, for a single GPU (conditional), ignoring the price (conditional), ignoring the heat (conditional), ignoring the power requirement (conditional), ignoring the noise (conditional) and ignoring the fact you'll be waiting many weeks to get one (conditional).
Because of all this lot, performance is surprisingly quite irrelevant, and quite frankly in games where there is no bias due to quality sabotage, or known bugs with the opposition, the GTX480 is nothing more than an HD5870 with a minor clock speed increase, the sort of which you can already buy.