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Nvidia's GF100 Turns Into GeForce GTX 480 and 470

Posted by timothy on from the that-nda-must-have-been-awfully-heavy dept.

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."

4 of 132 comments (clear)

  1. $1000 for graphics by tpstigers · · Score: 5, Funny

    Come on - is that all? There HAS to be a way I can spend 5 times that to play a video game.

  2. Expensive, power hungry? by Megahard · · Score: 5, Funny

    Sounds like the GF100 turned into the MRS100.

    --
    I eat only the real part of complex carbohydrates.
  3. Fermi needs a refresh or v2 by Artem+S.+Tashkinov · · Score: 5, Informative
    To summarize Fermi paper launch:
    • Fermi is a damn hot and noisy beast
    • Fermi is more expensive and only slightly faster than the respective ATI Radeon cards, thus DAAMIT will not cut prices for Radeons in the nearest future
    • Punters will have to wait at least for two weeks for general availability
    • Fermi desperately needs a reboot/refresh/whatever to attract masses

    It seems like NVIDIA has fallen into the same trap as with GeForce 5XXX generation launch.

  4. Re:Nvidia can only hope... by RzUpAnmsCwrds · · Score: 5, Informative

    More power draw than a CPU from the bad old days of Prescott

    Prescott at its hottest (Pentium 4 HT 571) was only 115W, which is about the same or (in some cases) vastly less than nearly every mid-range to high-end GPU today.

    Radeon 5830 is 175W
    Radeon 5850 is 151W
    Radeon 5770 is 108W

    Prescott at its hottest actually used less power than some of the current high-end Core i7 CPUs (i7-920 is 130W), although of course that's comparing a 1-core CPU to a vastly faster 4-core CPU.

    What's happened is that CPU coolers have gotten much better (thanks in part to heatpipes and larger fins/fans), power supplies have gotten more efficient and larger, and cases are better ventilated. The result is that today a 130W CPU is no big deal, whereas with the Prescott it caused all kinds of thermal nightmares for people building their own PCs (professionally engineered commercial PCs generally fared OK with Prescott).

    Still, 250W on a GPU is stupid. Even with modern efficient air cooling, it's hard to keep such a GPU cool without making a ton of noise. Add the crazy power supply requirements (most people are recommending 550W or more, which means $100+ if you want a quality PSU), and it's a pretty big burden. The real problem is that the ATI card is almost as fast, cheaper, and 80 watts cooler. And it's been on the market for 8 months.