Final thoughts and rating
NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 480 was greeted with a lukewarm reception on the day of launch. Excusing the egregiously bad pun, but a lot of noise was made about the how hard the cooler had to work to keep the hot-running GPU under 100°C. As we noted in our conclusion: 'NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 480 could have easily been better, perhaps should have been considering the time of arrival, but we feel that, underscored and handicapped by a paradigm shift in GPU thinking, it retains enough features and visceral ooh la la to be worthy of a £350-£400, if not £450'.The GeForce GTX 480 isn't the only Fermi-based GPU being made available to the public, though. Harvesting the silicon that doesn't make the GTX 480 grade and binning it at lower speeds in terms of frequencies and architecture, NVIDIA's launching the GeForce GTX 470 1,280MB. The snips in design - smaller frame-buffer, lower clocks, fewer ROPs, etc. - enable NVIDIA to push the GTX 470 at a lower price point and help reduce the thirstyness of the card at full load.
NVIDIA knows that GTX 470 has to provide stiff competition to AMD's Radeon HD 5870 and it's priced accordingly in the US. Available on pre-order for $349, GTX 470 is around $80 cheaper than AMD's finest single-GPU, but the situation is different in the UK, where pricing is far closer, falling in at £300-£330, including VAT, for both.
Speaking of performance, the GTX 470 is roughly on a par with the HD 5870 at the 1,920x1,200 resolution, helped by high scores in DiRT 2 DX9 and Far Cry 2, but it falls behind as the setting is ramped up to 2,560x1,600. Compounding the slight performance deficit is the Achilles heel of the GeForce 400-series line: high power-draw, loud fan noise, and scorching temperatures when gaming.
There's still merit in the GeForce GTX 470. PhysX is something the competition doesn't have; SLI scaling looks mighty impressive, and 3D Vision Surround promises to be cool and make use of the GPU's grunt. We also reckon that it will appear better over time as the expansive feature-set is tapped into by games developers becoming more familiar with the workings of the architecture.
However, NVIDIA and its partners have to do (at least) two things for the GTX 470 to succeed right now. They need to take care of the whole heat/noise/power issue (difficult) and then, specifically for the UK, reduce the cost of the card to £260 all in (easier) so that it neatly bisects both Radeon HD 58x0 GPUs' pricing.
Bottom line: GeForce GTX 470 1,280MB decent performance credentials and forward-looking architecture are overshadowed by an uncompetitive UK etail pre-order price and ongoing heat/noise/power concerns.
The good
Performance is close to AMD's fastest single-GPU card
SLI promises to be good, based on GTX 480's results.
Architecture's promise is yet to be realised
The not so good
Still too hot/loud/thirsty when compared to the competition
High pre-order etail price for the UK. Better value in the US
Excellent chassis cooling will be needed
Weak double-precision speed - one-eighth SP - for those who desire a super-fast GPGPU card
HEXUS Rating
HEXUS Where2Buy
HEXUS Right2Reply
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