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Is this day really here?
After numerous delays, mirages, rumors and multiple manifestations, the GTX 480 has arrived. You can believe it -- we have it right here on our workbench. Today we will take a thorough first investigation into Nvidia's somewhat troublesome, but very promising, new 'Fermi' architecture.
As video cards go, the GTX 480 has been somewhat controversial. By Nvidia's own admission, it's arrival is later than had been hoped. For every generation over the last few years -- since as far back as ATI's R600, HD2900XT anyways -- both product lines from Nvidia and ATI have had refreshes which have roughly coincided. This certainly was not the case with today's GTX 480. While ATI has been moving record amounts of HD 5000 video cards, Nvidia has been fending off the company's market momentum with GPUs that have fought more than a few battles. But, things change: here we are, end of March, and the GTX 480 is ready to come to the party.
The foremost question on every hardware enthusiasts', and PC gamers' mind is whether the wait was worth it... Well, we will soon find out.
As delays go, this one with Fermi was huge. Their has been no shortage of rumors. It is unnecessary to collect and detail them all here. But certainly, one factor with the delay had to be the complexity of Fermi itself. This is a big processor. With around three billion transistors, it does not get much more complex. Fermi was the first big dive into the smaller 40nm manufacturing process for Nvidia, so this transition, with such a big chip, was undoubtedly challenging to execute. Changes and revisions were needed to be made to get wrinkles out. The bigger the project, the more that can go wrong.
While Nvidia has been working hard on Fermi, ATI has released the entire HD 5000 series from top to bottom. So the GTX 480 has its work cut out for it. Nvidia is confident it is up to the challenge though -- let's get right into it!
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Thanks!
According to an online currency converter, that's £336
The lowest GTX 480 price in the UK is £430.
I would definitely be willing to pay £336, but £430 is taking the piss. Especially since warranties in the UK are bullshit. (For example, there's no Lifetime warranties on XFX graphics cards over here)
Fancy buying me one?
Great job and Great timing!
EDIT: so...no overclocking?
Could be better but kinda predictable, it's in the same spot the gtx280 was compared to the 4870.
The power consumption is ridiculous though, holy hell.
Yeah, that was somewhat of concern to me. This is another reason I wanted to wait before considering this card (this gen of cards) as a serious buy. Forget, for the moment about the MONSTER HD 5970. I have to wonder if an overclocked 5870 wouldn't make minced-meat out of the GTX 480. I mean DAMN lol how hot must that card run that we cannot overclock it?
This is why I want to wait and see what happens with this gen of NVIDIA.
From what the neo authors seemed to indicate, NVIDIA sat on this one trying to hone it for public release for quite some time, chances are they had to produce something or fail completely in the eyes of the investors.
From what it sounds like so far, they've expressed little interest in bringing the GF100 architecture down the ranks to the midrange offerings. Instead we'll be seeing 3rd / 4th gen rehashing of their product line in the 300 series. :/
http://www.allbusiness.com/professional-scientific/scientific-research-development/528243-1.html
I'm guessing the devices are still a bit large, but imagine if the card was designed to run in one of those units instead of in a normal PC case. The ridiculous heat could be used to POWER the card.
EDIT: Ok, this is odd. I just found out that someone tried overclocking the GTX 480.
http://www.legitreviews.com/article/1258/12/
45 Centigrade after overclocking? I think he's talking about idle temperatures only, and didn't mention under load. Still, I'm suprised he got away with overclocking that thing at all.
What's the temperature like under load with the fan at 100 percent, I wonder?
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