Palit GTX 470 Review - PAGE 2

Closer Look:

The first thing we like to do while taking a look at the card, is flip it over and get a nice good look at the PCB. Palit decided to use a brown PCB for their GTX 470, and judging by all of the screws this cooler might be difficult to remove. Also notice the "Don't Remove" sticker which is covering a screw. Palit definitely doesn't want people taking the cooler off of this card.

There is absolutely no use purchasing a video card that you cannot hook up to your monitor. However, most cards come with adapters that will allow you to use it with any monitor. The Palit GTX 470 itself should allow most users to utilize it without any problems. You'll be able to connect the card to your monitor via two DVI ports, one HDMI port, and one Display port. If you're using an older VGA monitor, you'll be able to use the DVI to VGA adapter included with the card.

If you're looking to utilize more then one GTX 470 you can do so by utilizing one of the two SLI connectors located on the top of the card. If you like spending money, you could also run three GTX 470's by utilizing both of the cards SLI connectors. In order to power the Palit GTX 470 you'll need to use two 6Pin power cables, which means the power requirements shouldn't be to bad.

What other hardware do you need to run the Palit GTX 470? Truth be told, you should be able to run the card as long as you are using hardware that didn't come from the AGP age. That's right, you'll need to use a PCIe X 16 2.0 slot. Remember though, older hardware will create a bottleneck for this card, so unless you're using newer equipment it might be worth it to purchase a lower end card. Or, first upgrade the rest of your system.

This is the point where I'd usually remove the cooler and give you guys a close look at the GPU itself. However, I found it to be extremely hard to remove the Palit GTX 470's cooler. In fact, I had to stop attempting to remove the cooler for fear of breaking the card. So instead of taking a look at the GPU, let's look at some of its' specifications.

Specifications

As far as specifications go the Palit GTX 470 is like any GTX 470. This means it uses the 40nm GF100 chip, which is packed with 3200 million transistors and 448 Stream processors. The card uses 1280MB of GDDR5 memory on a 320Bit bus. The Palit GTX 470 supports both DirectX 11 and OpenGL 3.2.

Smaller and Better: Nvidia GTX 260 and Palit GTX 470

As far as the clock speeds go, the Palit GTX 470 is stock clocked. This means that its' core clock is 608MHz, its' memory clock is 837MHz, and its' Shader clock is 1215 MHz. While these clock speeds by them selves should offer us a great deal of performance, we'll have to do some tuning to see just what we can make this card do!