AT fermi review is up!

[Lonyo]

http://www.hardware.fr/articles/787-4/dossier-nvidia-geforce-gtx-480.html

Some real power draw data for the video card only.

You can clearly see the 480 is pulling some mean wattage, getting to 298W. NV basically lied at the last minute, revising the TDP for their AIB partners cos admitting a near 300W limit for a single GPU would have made many of them faint. Another review has it reaching a max of 318W and 105C temps! So yeah, better have a damn well ventilated case.

Huge die size, insane power draw and heat, expensive and for a marginal performance gain in a few games and 1 useless synthetic benchmark? I don't see how this kind of monolithic architecture can keep going at this rate. Fermi is an utter failure. Looking forward to the next generation battle.

They didn't lie outright, they just changed their system.
Instead of TDP being basically a worst case scenario, like it is for AMD cards and all previous NV cards, they changed it (seemingly only on the GTX480 looking at various numbers) to being typical power draw (I think it's similar to the difference which there is, or at least used to be, between AMD and Intel TDPs, with AMD being typical and Intel being maximum).

The main "issue" is that they seem to still be using the old system on the GTX470 (225w was the load under Furmark and in gaming it was lower) while the other method is used on the GTX480, with 250w being the TDP and typical load, and Furmark etc giving maximum load at ~300w or so, which is what the TDP was claimed as being by certain parties, and what it would be if they followed the system which they used on all their previous cards and that AMD/ATI use for their cards.

So yeah, it's all marketing BS, and they changed the TDP to make it seem less of a dog than it really is. The GTX470 though is still a realistic TDP at 225w, or it seems so ftom the numbers available. The 480 is just a joke though.

 

[Silverforce11]

Its not just under furmark, under Crysis load is high too, so are the temperatures. The 480 consistently pull an extra 110 to 120W over a 5870. We know its around 188W. So the 300W mark is spot on.

What i find amazing is the cards can even OC by ~10% on average. Kinda wacked out if you think about it.. definitely won't be surviving very long at those OC power/temps.

Edit: Would be funny to see the Asus Voltage Mod version, claiming an extra 50% of power! Just think about that for a bit..

 

[MegaWorks]

Just grab a 5850. Some places have them for ~$260.

It has plenty of power for all the dx11 games. I play mostly Bad Company 2, AvP and Dirt 2 on my PC nowadays and have to say the 5850 is the best value card i've bought in years.

Yeah But in Canada the cheapest 5850 goes for $299 I think, really which it was around $260!

 

[MegaWorks]

You didn't play MAX. You have to have a direct x 11 card for Metro!

Yes max with my dx10 card, that's what I meant.

 

[Silverforce11]

Yeah But in Canada the cheapest 5850 goes for $299 I think, really which it was around $260!

Think about it this way, a 5850 is basically 95% of a 5870 after both are OC. The OC headroom for both are roughly the same. 950mhz to 1ghz is pretty common. Mine gets to 900mhz core without a voltage bump.

Best damn value in a video card since the radeon 9700pro or 8800GT days.

 

[MegaWorks]

Think about it this way, a 5850 is basically 95% of a 5870 after both are OC. The OC headroom for both are roughly the same. 950mhz to 1ghz is pretty common. Mine gets to 900mhz core without a voltage bump.

Best damn value in a video card since the radeon 9700pro or 8800GT days.

Yes I heard that it's easily overclocked to those clocked speed that you mentioned. But do they all overclock easily at those frequency?

 

[lopri]

I've stared at the SLI power consumption for minutes and it never gets old ahahaha

Gives you a wholesomely new perspective on "Power".

Thank you Ryan for an incredibly comprehensive review.

 

[Dark4ng3l]

As seen in other reviews the 480 clearly goes beyond it's 250W TDP in tests. Hardware.fr talked to them about it and they said their TDP is based on real game results and not extreme tests like furmark. Fine but in their tests the card goes over 300W in 3dmark 06 and based on AT's crysis vs furmark temps you have to think the card is drawing similar power in both cases.

 

[lopri]

According to the review:

Furthermore there’s an interesting pattern in our averages: the gap between the GTX 400 series and the Radeon 5000 series shrinks with resolution. Keep an eye on this, it’s going to be a repeating pattern.

When we reviewed the Radeon 5870 back in September we found that AMD’s 8x MSAA performance was virtually unchanged, and 6 months later that still holds true. The performance hit moving from 4x MSAA to 8x MSAA on both Radeon cards is roughly 13%. NVIDIA on the other hand took a stiffer penalty under DX10 for the GTX 285, where there it fell by 25%. But now with NVIDIA’s 8x MSAA performance improvements for Fermi, that gap has been closed. The performance penalty for moving to 8x MSAA over 4x MSAA is only 12%, putting it right up there with the Radeon cards in this respect. With the GTX 480, NVIDIA can now do 8x MSAA for as cheap as AMD has been able to

Is there an explanation on this? (I remember there was a mention of GDDR5 controller)

 

[Ryan Smith]

Gives you a wholesomely new perspective on "Power".

Thank you Ryan for an incredibly comprehensive review.

For NVIDIA's sake, it's probably best we did switch power supplies. With our Corsair 850W unit, that number was 900W.

According to the review:
Is there an explanation on this? (I remember there was a mention of GDDR5 controller)

For 8x MSAA, NVIDIA just made some ROP changes. They have better compression and the additional ROPs help offset the penalty for AA'ing smaller primitives (which don't compress well).

As for why we're seeing the performance gap close between the cards at higher resolutions, at this point I don't have a good answer for that.

 

[sciwizam]

As seen in other reviews the 480 clearly goes beyond it's 250W TDP in tests. Hardware.fr talked to them about it and they said their TDP is based on real game results and not extreme tests like furmark. Fine but in their tests the card goes over 300W in 3dmark 06 and based on AT's crysis vs furmark temps you have to think the card is drawing similar power in both cases.

Techpowerup

For this test we measure power consumption of only the graphics card, via PCI-Express power connector(s) and PCI-Express bus slot. A Keithley Integra 2700 with 6.5 digits is used for all measurements. Again, the values here reflect card only power consumption measured at DC VGA card inputs, not the whole system.

Peak (using 3DMark03) 267 W
Maximum (Using Furmark) 320 W

 

[dguy6789]

Wow, 320W full load for a single 480. I never would have expected something that high. At the very most I was thinking 270-280 watts. This makes it break PCI Express certification.

 

[ElFenix]

Think about it this way, a 5850 is basically 95% of a 5870 after both are OC. The OC headroom for both are roughly the same. 950mhz to 1ghz is pretty common. Mine gets to 900mhz core without a voltage bump.

Best damn value in a video card since the radeon 9700pro or 8800GT days.

when the 4870s were being blown out for under $150 AR about a year ago that was the best value in a video card since the voodoo3 tnt2 days.

 

[sciwizam]

Also, I don't think anyone else mentioned this: 90C idle with dual displays.

All that changed with the GeForce GTX 480 as you notice some dramatic changes right away. For starters adding a second monitor to the GeForce GTX 480 increased the systems power consumption by 80W, which is a 43% increase in the systems idle power consumption! If that wasn't bad enough the card would idle at 90C, which is 33C or ~58% higher than with one monitor! For comparison sake the GeForce GTX 285's GPU temperature went up ~21%.

 

[Lonyo]

Also, I don't think anyone else mentioned this: 90C idle with dual displays.

That's a bit of a killer, although at least NV aren't pushing multiple displays, unlike ATI.
If NV were trying to say "woo look at our display outputs and you can game with 3 monitors" then it would be quite amusing.

 

[RollsMk2]

This is the most awesome card in the whole wide world

 

[coldpower27]

Yeah But in Canada the cheapest 5850 goes for $299 I think, really which it was around $260!

Yeah, and I don't like the idea of having to overclock my video card to get a decent performance boost over what I currently have.

 

[1h4x4s3x]

Now we know why Nvidia went for a Friday.
Oh btw. a German reviewer killed a card while OCing.

 

[ugaboga232]

Why not? It's basically free performance...

 

[zod96]

Looks like to me the 5870/5850 are still a much much better overall card and the one to still get. I was actually considering getting the GTX480 or 470 but after these reviews I'll stick with my 5870....

 

[Paratus]

<Trolling>It's a good card for lower resolutions like 25x16 but one on one it can't compete with a 5870 at higher resolutions like 3x1680 or 3x1920.</Trolling>

 

[psychoticdream]

Now we know why Nvidia went for a Friday.
Oh btw. a German reviewer killed a card while OCing.

who? where??

 

[vj8usa]

Yes max with my dx10 card, that's what I meant.

Damn, Metro runs that well for you? I had to drop from "very high" to "high" to get playable framerates on my 4850, and that's only at 1280x800.

 

[manicfreak]

Can anyone explain the discrepancy between AT's and Legitreviews' in the folding bench?

 

[dzoner]

Edit: Would be funny to see the Asus Voltage Mod version, claiming an extra 50% of power! Just think about that for a bit..

Wasn't that 50% faster? and I believe it referred to the length of time it took to fry up a bacon strip.