Nvidia on Friday introduced its fastest graphics cards to date, which will be able to play back 3D movies on PCs and bring more realistic images to games.
Based on the new Fermi architecture announced in September last year the 480 is a huge improvement on the current stock of 2xx’s available but not without its issues…
Heat problems have been reported from day one with the cards and in their current pre-release form there are still issues regarding heat. Two SLI 480′s produce enough heat between them to cause the cards to automatically shut down to preserve the hardware from heat damage. Nvidia themselves have said that a triple SLI option would not be possible in the short term for the 480′s because of heat issues, this leaves us a little concerned as overclocking will be completely ruled out and even current “high end” PC builds are having to resort to water cooling simply to run at a stable level.
Obviously as drivers and stock cooling improve this new addition to the graphics card market will become more viable, or at least we hope so.
On the more positive side:
The GeForce GTX 480/470 has promised a lot of things, and has a lot to offer. It supports DirectX 11 out of the box, therefore you’re set to see some amazing visuals on future titles to surface soon. Driven by 480 CUDA cores, this thing is indeed a monster. 700 MHz Graphics Clock, 1401 MHz of Processor clock ensures you get every bit of it’s extreme energy in every game and software you’re running. The memory specifications is something which we can also brag about, 1.5 Gigabytes of DDR5 running at a blistering clock speed of 1.8 GHz.
Rest of the features are NVIDIA’s standard, like, PhysX, CUDA, PureVideo, 3D Vision Surround and some other features which we’ve already seen in older GeForce Graphics Cards as well. What really matters right now are benchmarks. We would really love to see those and assess what this Chip is actually capable of doing, and is it really worth the money or not because a price tag of 500 US Dollars might hold back some gamers from affording it.
My pre-order with ebuyer was cancelled, apparently stock delays from Nvidia.. I don’t like the way this is going, sound like quality issues to me.
Might give it a month or two to see how it performs elsewhere before throwing the money at it.
WANT.
WANT.
I have one of these beasts on pre-order, will pop a performance review up when I have had a chance to test it out.