GTX480 Review

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It finally happened. NVIDIA eventually lifted the curtain on the long overdue GF100 based GeForce series of graphics cards. After numerous delays, the graphics card has shown up in more or less the configuration that had been rumoured nearly half a year ago. Despite the wishes of some polarizing write-ups online, the graphics cards had better availability at launch than what the competition (ATI) offered in November of 2009.

With that said, the NVIDIA GTX400 series is actually five months later than what consumers would have wanted, and with five months to make up for, the question remained, “was the wait worth it?” The answer to such a question is not as clear cut as some may want it to be. Regardless of where you stand, it is obvious to everyone that the GTX480 is indeed the single fastest GPU we have seen to date. While it isn’t the fastest graphics card on the market, as that honour belongs to the competition’s Radeon HD5970 graphics card, being able to claim the fastest GPU ever produced is very important to NVIDIA. So much so that the company poured a ridiculous number of gates into a core that is physically smaller than that of 2006’s G80 but far denser and more powerful per square mm. How many gates the GF100 houses exactly will remain within the walls of NVIDIA, but the number they are willing to publicly disclose about the GF100 core is 3.2 billion gates. That makes it the densest processing unit that you can buy in any consumer level CPU or GPU. In fact, that makes it more than twice the size of the already large GT200 core (1.4 billion) by a good 400 million gates, which means you can fit a single 7800 GTX core in there and still have gates left over, or you could almost build a complete G80 GPU using the left over t...

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...ort comings, it’s still a graphics card worth owning, especially if you want to play the latest games with the most advanced settings enabled. The GTX480 is an excellent graphics card that delivers the ultimate performance and is certainly worth the investment.

Reviewer: Neo Sibeko

Benchmark results

Heaven Benchmark 2.1: 1341

3DMark Vantage: P17270

3DMark06: 22233

Crysis Warhead 1920x1080: 68.77

Resident Evil 5 1920x1080 4xAA: 100.7 fps

Award: Hardware

Score: 8/10

Bottom line: It may have been late but NVIDIA has does it again by producing not only the largest but fastest GPU ever.

Plus:

Fast, very fast

CUDA

3D-Vision Surround

4-Way SLI

Minus:

Heat

Very heavy power draw

Specs:

Core: 700MHz GF100 (40nm)

Processors: 480

Render Outputs: 40

Memory: 1,536MB GDDR5 (3,996MHz) 177GB/sec

API: DirectX11/OpenGL3.x, OpenCL 1.0, CUDA,PhysX

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