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Nvidia's GF100 Turns Into GeForce GTX 480 and 470
crazipper writes "After months of talking architecture and functionality, Nvidia is finally going public with the performance of its $500 GeForce GTX 480 and $350 GeForce GTX 470 graphics cards, both derived from the company's first DirectX 11-capable GPU, GF100. Tom's Hardware just posted a comprehensive look at the new cards, including their power requirements and performance attributes. Two GTX 480s in SLI seem to scale impressively well — providing you have $1,000 for graphics, a beefy power supply, and a case with lots of airflow."
That there are a lot of lunatic performance enthusiasts and deep-pocketed GPU computing users out there. $500, 250 watts, only modestly faster than the competitor's cheaper, cooler card that has been out for some months now, and has variants and cut-downs spanning more or less the entire price/performance spectrum from sub-$100 to mid $400s...
One cannot deny that they are, in fact, the fastest; but in all other respects they just got owned. More power draw than a CPU from the bad old days of Prescott(and Prescott was 90nm, this sucker is 40nm), a gigantic die that must cost a small fortune just to manufacture, hideously audible fan noise just to keep the thing from melting down. They'll have to cut the power draw by a factor of five to land any laptop design wins at all, a factor of ten for anything that isn't a 2.5 inch thick gamer box of a laptop.
Unless there is a large enough market of crazy gamers who just must have the fastest, or GPU computing people who don't care how expensive or noisy these cards are because they are in the datacenter doing some sort of algorithmic trading, Nvidia has a real loser on their hands...
Point 2 is inaccurate. The 480 is cheaper than the 5970 (by almost $200) and the 480 beats the 5970 in multiple benchmarks.
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