If you were to say Nvidia’s GTX 480 was the top of the line card from the green camp, you’d only be partially correct. While it is, at face value, the “top of the line”, it is in fact a neutered second place finisher. You see, Nvidia deactivated one block of 32 cuda cores (the processing mini-brains in the fermi architecture) giving the card it’s 480 name — 480 processing cores. For some time, a fully unlocked 512-core version has been...
Common practice for high-end video cards is gobs of power, big heat sinks, and endless smiles. While all are very flattering, sometimes you don’t want to take up gobs of space, as factory overclocked cards can often spill into a third PCI slot. The performance is definitely wanted, the extra girth from heat sinks is not. Thankfully, consumers now have cards such as the eVGA GTX 480 Hydro Copper to help them with such issues. The Hydro Copper is actually a tweaked...
I don’t know about you, but when new computer parts come out, I’m constantly re-evaluating my set up, comparing specs, and crunching god knows what kind of numbers in my head. With the lead up to Fermi and the GTX 4xx series cards, I was pretty stoked — being a long time Nvidia fan myself. And then the early reviews came out and it all got shot to hell. Not only to they run really hot, the price to performance benefit over the ATI 5870 (or for the sake...
Ever since we saw early specs and hands on previews (and now reviews) of the latest Nvidia cards — the GTX 470 and 480 — many were passing off hand comments that an egg could be fried on these new cards due their high operating temperature. In many circumstances, idling between 70-80 C isn’t uncommon. For a reference, my ATI CrossFire 5850 set up never goes above 50 C idling. Two different cards, two different architectures though. Seeing as how the new...
What better way to wake up than to a fresh leak of information and visual representation of the latest and greatest graphics card to hit the market. If anything else, the heat pipes jutting out of the side make for quite the interesting sight. The DirectX11 toting GTX 480 is certainly a potent piece of hardware. If it weren’t for the lofty price tag (and perhaps the lack of DisplayPort) I’d have me one in a heartbeat. For now, dual ATI 5850′s will...
