nVidia GTX480 Performance Test
Conclusion
The GTX480 is significantly faster than the GTX285 and the GTX470, almost across the board. Many titles where the GTX470 struggled against the GTX285 are significantly faster on the GTX480, so this is a true upgrade over either card.
Keep in mind that you pay for the extra performance with extremely high noise levels. Subjectively this card is the nosiest card I’ve ever used, being even louder than the GTX470 which previously held that reputation. Under load it rapidly ramps up to a 70% fan speed (3000 rpm), and anyone in the same room will be disturbed by the fan noise unless they’re using headphones at a reasonable volume for gaming or music. The noise then becomes a lot less intrusive, and it’s quite possible to game for long periods of time.
Pros
- Significantly faster than both a GTX285 and GTX470 almost across the board.
- 1.5 GB memory for modern games and high levels of AA.
- Best AF in consumer space.
- Huge range of AA modes which also function in DX10/DX11.
Cons
- Rare titles still show very poor performance.
- Very high TDP for a single GPU.
- Extreme noise levels.
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1st of all overclocking the CPU will boost the performance of GTX 470 and 480.
2nd it will be nice to upgrade to nvidia 260.63
3rd why testing games that nobody plays nowadays?
I think that if you got oney to spend an upgrade from gtx 285 to fermi (even gtx 470) is ok. Keep in mind that na OC gtx 470 match a stock gtx 480.
Believe it or not, people do play older games. I still play a lot of older games (more than 3-4 years old) today.
An oc’ed GTX 470 can hardly match a stock 480. It would have to be oc’ed like hell (800MHz or so, with memory at like 4200MHz).. and don’t forget that the 480 can be oc’ed as well.
I do agree with you though that 2.8GHz is rather low for the CPU. It should’ve been at least 3.33GHz to match the high-end CPU offering, which should go hand-in-hand with high-end GPU. Heck, my i7 920’s are oc’ed to 4GHz on air.
You guys are falling into the common trap of vastly overstating CPU requirements. An i5 750 @ stock is absolute overkill for those games at the settings I run them at. I’ll prove this with an i7 870 review I have coming up.
I’ve already tested the first page (1920×1200) and there’s absolutely no performance change.
Cool, but the first page is consisted of newer games that are multi-threaded and GPU-limited. Older games on the last page, like for example UT2004, are not multi-threaded, and on my PC, when I overclock my i7 920 from 2.66GHz to 4GHz, I see a huge increase in frame rates in some parts that still max out my i7’s single core clocked at 4.1GHz during intense firefights in Onslaught mode. Frame rates still dip below the 85fps online cap, and when it’s at 2.66GHz, they are much more noticeable and frequent. Just letting ya know.. it was one of the main reasons I upgraded my CPU!
Even if you ignore nVidia’s performance problems in UT2004, you’d have to come up with a very synthetic situation to make the CPU the bottleneck at my settings (2560×1600 with 8xS).
Also don’t forget turbo boost, which will overclock the CPU in single-threaded games. My i7 870 will hit 3.6 GHz if only one core is loaded.