GTX480 brand

[cody_horner]

Hey guys,

I'm looking to buy a new GTX480 card, but am curious if one brand is better than the other excluding price differences. I'm looking at a stock GTX480, not any of the overclocked versions.

Do they differ? Come with better capacitors etc. between brands or are they mostly reference for the base level cards?

 

[Sickamore]

You want to look for warranty and customer service. Heard evga has some good warranty on its cards. The best GTX 480 out today is

http://www.msi.com/index.php?func=proddesc&maincat_no=130&cat2_no=716&prod_no=2162

 

[cody_horner]

Wow, that MSI Lightning card looks insane. Very cool (no pun intended? ha ha). I bet that costs a pretty penny more than stock.

I ended up taking your recommendation after confirming they have a lifetime warranty and grabbed one of the EVGA 480's. Running it now =) Drooling over that MSI though.... damn!

 

[happy medium]

Wow, that MSI Lightning card looks insane. Very cool (no pun intended? ha ha). I bet that costs a pretty penny more than stock.

I ended up taking your recommendation after confirming they have a lifetime warranty and grabbed one of the EVGA 480's. Running it now =) Drooling over that MSI though.... damn!

wow, howd you get a card in 3 hours? Bestbuy?

 

[Idontcare]

holy cow and I thought I was an impulse shopper

 

[Idontcare]

Welcome to the forums cody_horner! :thumbsup:

 

[Sickamore]

Good to see your happy.

 

[cody_horner]

I live in a town with a large computer parts distributor here in Canada. Canadacomputers.com Took a whole 10 minutes to drive over to grab one. I was looking to grab a new one last night and figured I'd ask on here as well as doing my own research.

This card is fast, but gets pretty noisy when in games. Might be it's only downfall. Any of you have any experience with after-market cooling?

p.s - thanks for the welcome! Also, how do you guys set your signature with your machine specs? I can't seem to find that anywhere... though I probably should be working at the moment haha. I'll throw in mine just for fun. Does the job nicely despite it not being an i7!

______________________________
Core 2 Duo (wolfdale) @ 3.78ghz
Asus P5K Deluxe
4GB Corsair DDR2
2x500GB WD Black 32MB cache in RAID 0
1TB WD Storage Drive
EVGA GTX480 @ 750core, 2000mem clock

 

[Shmee]

nice buy and welcome! Are you going to Oc the card? I hear the later batches of GF100's oc quite well as long as cooling is under control.

I see you have an oced C2D. Might want to drop a Q9550 in there to help keep up with the card in newer games!

Also, on a side note, the sparkle GTX 480's can be had cheaper and also carry a lifetime warranty. Probably not the same customer service you would get from evga though.

 

[Sickamore]

The reason i recommend the msi card its because its cooler than those other cards.

http://www.youtube.com/user/TimeToLiveCustoms?blend=2&ob=1#p/u/4/PoWuJxbR5iM
http://www.youtube.com/user/TimeToLiveCustoms?blend=2&ob=1#p/u/3/UKzBqQTkzeY

check this review both of them

 

[Arkadrel]

Just wanted to put in that the 480 uses like 54watts at idle, and over 320watts at avg load when playing games. If you overclock it abit and give it a tiny bit of volts, you could be looking at over 400 watts used.

480 prices on newegg = 499$ to 649$


now for cheaper than that, you could just buy 2x 460's that ll offer better performance in SLI than a singel 480. They ll use less power doing it... or get 2x 6870s that offer almost 480 SLI performance for ALOT less.


1 480 = 499$ cheapest on newegg.
2x 6870 = 239$x 2 = 478$ cheapsest on newegg.

2x 6870 is ALMOST 480 SLI (and cheaper than 1 x 480 card).

do you see what happend here? double performance for less price.... its silly to buy a 480 at 499$. It has horrible price/performance, and it has horrible performance/watt.

2x 6870 use less electristy than 1 x 480 card.

 

[Shmee]

where did you get that Xfire 6870 is roughly equivalent to SLI 480s? Still, I get your point. The 480's are very expensive, and use lots of power. I would suggest, for someone buying more than half a grand in GPU, to wait for the 69xx series.

 

[Sickamore]

where did you get that Xfire 6870 is roughly equivalent to SLI 480s? Still, I get your point. The 480's are very expensive, and use lots of power. I would suggest, for someone buying more than half a grand in GPU, to wait for the 69xx series.

Best advice so far.

 

[cody_horner]

Cool, thanks for the video review link Sickamore - however, the fans aren't any less noisy I noticed in the video when the MSI card got hot. I'm more looking for quiet than massive cooling performance. However, I'm quite happy with the performance of my 480 coming from an 8800GTX

As far as SLI and Crossfire. I would never recommend that to anyone. A single card is always better. You're paying for 2 cards, when you're not guaranteed to see anything better than a 50% increase in frame rate. Talk about a horrible cost and power to performance ratio! You're using only half or less of the 2nd card.

I've tried SLI before with two of my 8800's, and it was crap. I've also tested out a Crossfire setup, and it's not any better than SLI - in fact, it's not even as good as SLI. Game incompatibility, and some games just don't have that much of a performance increase. The number of games that do, are slim. Not to mention, two of any brand card is going to have even more noise and more heat unless those new ATI cards are just THAT much quieter and cooler which I doubt having owned ATI cards in the past.

Shmee, how high do you think I could clock up the Q9550? =) I've not seen any data on those for overclockability. If I could do at least 3.5-3.6ghz on air with one of those I'd grab one tomorrow haha

Edit: when do you think those 69xx's will be out? I didn't even think of that though, from my past ATI card experiences -> it's been a while since I've liked their products.

 

[Arkadrel]

Cody horner.... what your saying about SLI and Crossfire is wrong.

Most of the time you ll see that crossfire/SLI scale at about 80-90%. (not 50% like you said)


So 1x 6870 + ~90% of 1 extra 6870 is pretty darn good value.

They did alot improvement wise with the 6870s and crossfire, which is why the 6870s are almost matching the 480s in SLI.

Why are the SLOWER 6870s almost matching the much faster 480s in SLI?
Because 480s in SLI doesnt scale as well as the 6870s do.

so:
2x 6870 CF is about equal to 2x 480 SLI.
478$ ---------------vs------------ 998$

for almost same performance.... you take your pick.
The 480 SLI will have ~10% faster gameplay... if you think thats worth 520$ then yes go for the SLI 480s.

 

[TemjinGold]

cody_horner: You mentioned a horrible waste of power but did you know that the 480 is actually such a power hog that it uses more power than the 5970 (that's 2 cards in 1)? The 480 is actually the horrible waste of power. The 6870s are even more power efficient, so two 6870s are actually better than one 480 in price, performance, noise, and power consumption.

 

[Arkadrel]

the 480 uses 320 watts under load.
the 6870 uses 151 watts under load.

2x 6870 CF = 151x2 = 302 watts
2x 480 SLI= 320x2 = 640 watts

now these two performance almost equal in games.


SO over twice the price, over twice the power use, for less than 10% performance.

to me 480 SLI seems like a very bad deal.

Have any of you see the youtube video of a guy with 4x 480s, and him useing 1600watts?
He has overclocked 480s in 4x SLI and uses 1600 watts for his crafics cards (he has a PSU for his grafics cards, and another for the rest of the pc). Then he measure with a wattometer, at the wall for the PSU that powers his 4x 480s grafics cards.

1600watts/4 cards = 400watts pr card with Overclocked 480s.

 

[Sickamore]

cody_horner: You mentioned a horrible waste of power but did you know that the 480 is actually such a power hog that it uses more power than the 5970 (that's 2 cards in 1)? The 480 is actually the horrible waste of power. The 6870s are even more power efficient, so two 6870s are actually better than one 480 in price, performance, noise, and power consumption.

Right right. I wont change his mind becuase he is firm on it. I really think you should be open cordy to opinion because those guys in here have hard one or look at the benchmark.

 

[Shmee]

Shmee, how high do you think I could clock up the Q9550? =) I've not seen any data on those for overclockability. If I could do at least 3.5-3.6ghz on air with one of those I'd grab one tomorrow haha

Edit: when do you think those 69xx's will be out? I didn't even think of that though, from my past ATI card experiences -> it's been a while since I've liked their products.

Hey, if you get the E0 stepping of the Q9550, most of them will do 3.8-4.2 on good air with a good board. Is your board p45 or p35? I forget...Either way, I know it is a popular asus, its just that the p35 have trouble with higher FSB's, especially with quads. Keep in mind the Q9550 only uses an 8.5 core multi.

Still, I would guess 3.5-3.6 would be doable, even with a P35 board and a C1 stepping. If E0, I would think 3.8 should be attainable, 4 and mb higher if your board is up to the task

Remember you may need to play with ram dividers/OC ram a bit with the higher FSBs. Or just buy a new kit, they are cheap now

 

[Shmee]

oh, and just a disclaimer, no OC is guaranteed!

But ya, in case you arent familiar as much with ocing the quads, you may need to adjust NB voltage, CPU VTT, and ease up on ram timings and frequency for stability as well as messing with Vcore.

 

[cody_horner]

Guys, geez. Don't bite my head off lol, I was speaking from my own experience on SLI/Crossfire and think it's a waste of money IMO having tried it before. The games and uses for my card do not condone the use of SLI - I would rarely if ever make use of the 2nd card as the only FPS game I play is BattleField 2. With a single power sucking GTX480, it runs like butter for me @ 1900x1200. The other games I like to play are RTS games like Company of Heroes which doesn't work properly with SLI/the scaling is pretty bad at best (I know, I've tried). My other uses are for video encoding and Photoshop use -> not much of a case for buying SLI.

You will never sell me on SLI until these technologies act more like dual core CPU's with actual threaded optimization, not 'faux' threaded optimization done with a combination of software and hardware. I know what I'm talking about in this sense despite me being off on the wattage of the new cards

Shmee - I have the P35express chipset on my board. It seems to run fine right now (edit: by that I mean it's been perfectly stable with 0 crashes for the past year or so) with my Cruicial Ballistix ram @ 420 bus. That would only me ~3.5ghz though with an 8.5 multiplier.

Thanks for the heads up I am pretty familiar with over clocking already - I used to even over clock my router years ago to help reduce router saturation. Fun times! Never OC'ed a quad though however, so it sounds like I'll have more to tweak there.

 

[TemjinGold]

We're not necessarily trying to sell you on SLi/X-Fire (though the SLi/X-Fire you experienced back in the day is nothing like the kind of scaling possible today as there are now massive improvements to it.) I'd personally try to sell you on just using ONE 6870:

- In the games you listed, the 6870 will be just as smooth. (It loses a few frames on benchmarks but nothing near enough to affect what you experience in those games.)
- It costs less than half what the 480 costs.
- It uses less than half the power.
- It is infinitely quieter.
- It runs MUCH cooler.

It's your money and I'm glad you like your card. At the end of the day, if you feel it's worth what you spent despite what we've mentioned, that's really all that matters.

 

[MangoX]

Wow you guys, stop raining on the guy and make him feel bad with his purchase.

@Cody: Don't listen to them. The GTX480 is still a very good gaming card despite it's issues with heat and power. It was designed to be the fastest single gpu on the planet. As long as you're happy with the card, that's all that matters.

I would look into upgrading to a quad core cpu like mentioned. Most games now make use of at least 2 threads, and no doubt will they start to use more. The GTX480 is a hefty investment, so I bet you'll be keeping it for a long while. Later down a quad will help you tons in CPU limited situations.

 

[cody_horner]

Thanks Azn - what a bunch of downers! Maybe he's just jealous he has a 5850 while I can play games with a single GPU at max settings and cook my breakfast on it all in one go

I'll probably take the advice and grab one of those CPU's later this week. I think I might go for the Q9650 to max out what my current socket 775 setup can do - the Q9650 starts at the E0 stepping with a 9x multiplier, which would be pretty easy as with my current CPU to go straight for 400x9 on the default voltage with those, I'd bet money on it.

 

[Arkadrel]

The 480 is a good card, and has been since its been out.

Its just your timeing is off.... the 6950 would be out in a few weeks time, and probably make then 480 drop like 40% in price. So naturally people are saying you probably payed way more for it than you would have needed if you waited a few weeks.

Apart from that the 480 does use 320 watts under load which is ALOT, reguardless of if its currently the fastest singel gpu on the planet (not the fastest card, a 5970 is faster than a 480).

ps. Im just saying, if I used 500-600$ on a gfx card, and 2-3 weeks later, it was only worth 300$ or so, id feel ripped off abit.