Guru3d 480/470 review is up

The heat itself isn't a problem. They are designed to run at that temp all day long 24/7 for however long the lifespan of the card is. Heat only turns us off because we don't want our other parts to get warm. But this card sits in an enclosed fan case and i don't know which way the exhaust is but if you have a case fan there shouldn't be an issue. My card i have now was known to hit those temps and have the noisiest fan ever. Putting an aftermarket fan on was no problem for me and a no brainier.

Plus the heat issue they can work out while ati scrambles to release their new card.

 

You know lol .. its just sad you (we) just cant ASK Nvidia. Hmm wait they did post on their forums that 470/480 are out.. ask questions blah blah. But when asked about temp. That was one part he just didnt test. huh? You know all the other in and outs but temp. I guess it could happen.

We need to come back from la la land. Ok it does not stomp on ATI/AMD at all. Do you know how long CUDA has been around? And now its being tossed in like ..oooh look what we have... Physx not all games have it so. And DONT expect do see the same benchmarks some site is getting when you get the card. We all KNOW were going to here "my card never gets higher than 40C" lol

And the card is kind of gimped? 480 then later we will get 512? Well that really matter? I bet the price will be CHEAPER.. then your gonna be pissed. And we will here ooh that doesnt make any difference. Me I am going to wait.

This time Nvidia did not come out with a hit.. Just very late to the game.

 

Well it saddens me to say that I've ordered a Sapphire HD5870 Vapour-X from Novatech and it'll be delivered on Wednesday. I'm sad because I want to move up to DX11 but NVIDIA's new products seem superb in every respect except pricing (I live in the UK where the cheapest card is an eye-opening £430), thermal design, fan noise and power consumption.

Maybe I'll regret this decision, maybe I won't but one thing I do know is that I *will* miss cool extras like PhysX, those lovely game profiles and I really wanted a card with more than 1 GB of memory but I feel I've waited long enough to dip into DX11 and don't want to wait any longer plus my GTX 280 seems to be struggling with the latest games such as Just Cause 2, Alien vs. Predator and Metro 2033.

That said, I'm only looking at the HD5870 as a temporary solution for perhaps a year until NVIDIA can get their own DX11 cards right in every area including power consumption, temperatures and fan noise.

 

Well thats it mate, you gotta do what you feel is the right, the 5870 is a great card but personally i would miss nvidia drivers and the extra's like you mentioned too much to go back to ATI.

 

I'm going to make the most of GPU water simulation and Bohek filtering in Just Cause 2 while I still have my GTX 280. Yeah they kill the framerate but they do look gorgeous. Gonna really miss stuff like that.

/blubs

 

I keep saying this and it almost seems as though you purposely ignore it.

You can run PhysX if you so desire.

(JFYI, you have the PSU, Motherboard and Nvidia card required to accomplish this).

 

No I wasn't ignoring it at all as I did a bit of reading about this earlier in fact but it seems you need to install some kind of unofficial patch in order to get it working and the results are mixed because it isn't supported by NVIDIA. As such I'm not too keen on the idea although it's an option, true. I'll certainly try it at some point and see how it goes. My GTX 280 might be a bit overkill for a PhysX card though.

Why they felt the need to disable PhysX when an ATI graphics card is detected I'll never know as you need an NVIDIA graphics card in order to use it. It's not like you can run GPU PhysX only on ATI hardware!!! :bang:

P.S. Would having an NVIDIA card for PhysX also allow it to do the Bohek filtering and GPU water simulation in Just Cause 2? Just curious...

 

I wish the Guru3d article covered SLi scores

 

Yes I seriously want 470 SLI scores.

 

Not sure about the last question but this business of disabling PhysX if the driver detects a non Nvidia GPU running alongside an Nvidia GPU is a major factor in my decision to dump NV for the moment.

I still paid for the Nvidia card after all.

They've done a lot of underhanded things in the last 12 months and I'll be damned if I'm going to support them (at least not until they get their act together).

 

Incidentally, when I cancelled my GTX 480 pre-order, Scan told me that I'd have to wait up to five days for the £437 refund. Now at that point, I didn't even realise they had taken my money as this card isn't out for another two weeks. I was quite annoyed at that and will not be using them for pre-orders in the future. I thought anyone thinking of ordering a GTX 470 or 480 from them should be aware of this sneaky tactic!!! :3eyes:

Oddly enough nothing appeared on my credit card statement until *AFTER* I'd cancelled it leading to me to think they may have decided to charge me just so they could get five days interest on my money. I also received an email stating that my order had despatched (but Scan told me to ignore any further automated emails). There was actually a brief moment of excitement I must admit.

 

Yah, I love that - the money goes instantly but takes days to be returned on top of the fact they charged you for something they don't even have yet :bang:

 

Fully agree with the above. The Physx issue is a big no-no for a consumer that is supposedly free from tyranny in this "big open world".
Darren you keep mentioning DX11 as some sort of saving grace for Fermi, and judging by the reviews it cannot sufficiently best 5870 for the price/tdp/noise. ATi has Havok and thus far I really like it, and at the end of the day all of this physics calculations, as far as I can remember, given all this horsepower of i7s and i9s, one should not be concerned with it, nothing more but a fancy gimmick.

 

I remember a lot of guys saying, I will not buy the ati 5xxx series because of the directx 11!!! It's just stupid!! only for 3/4 games out there with the tech for it? no waaay!!! loosing phyx is not an option!.

Now on the contrary, lots of comments like... I always go for the newest tech!! -I'll buy a gtx480!(when you can clearly see they never had an ati 5xxx series on their spec... or any ati for that matter)

Is this for real? we need to be better at this... all this from money point of view..
Phyx is not a good enough reason alone, to go for nvidia this time around, for me at least, though I still want to see an nvidia legend card.

Still, the worst issue I see with fermi as I said before performance wise, is that it wont do much better than ati at 1900x1200 res and above... the performance of it drops too much at high res, ati is more stable in that.

As Hitler reacts said, "I only want to play Crysis maxed out without any lag"

 

In my case, I didn't need a DX11 card back in October 2009 and with the NVIDIA cards yet to arrive I was more than happy to wait until they were then I could make an informed choice as to which to go for now I *do* feel I need more performance *and* DX11.

I was utterly blinded by the impressive benchmarks for the GTX 480 and pre-ordered one without really considering the cost, temperature, noise and power issues. Now that I've had time to think, I've realised that I can get something almost as good for 25% less in price that uses less power, runs cooler but still allows me to use DX11 effects. The HD5870 might not be the best card or the fastest but, right now, if offers better value than the GTX 480 IMO. That's the honest truth coming from someone who has been pretty much using NVIDIA cards since the Riva TNT back in the late 90s except for a brief stint with the HD3850 AGP card.

I'm not abandoning NVIDIA, I will hopefully get a lot of enjoyment out of my HD5870 and it'll keep me content until the competition can redesign and shrink the die size of the Fermi so that it's both more affordable and less power hungry. I'm actually looking forward to reading about what the 512 CUDA core GTX 490 will perform like to be honest but I don't expect we'll see that until near the end of the year at the earliest.

 

Well that's true but NVIDIA are at long last on the verge of releasing DX11 cards and they outperform the HD5870 by a small margin in average and minimum framerates in most games and benchmarks. For enthusiasts that's probably all the matters but for everyone else that performance has come at too high a price (literally in the case of the UK where the GTX 480 is selling for between £430 and £500!).

The GTX 480 does look to be 50% faster at tessellation though where it is heavily used as the Heaven 2.0 benchmarks show. I doubt any game would ever use tessellation to the extent but with it being a big key feature of DX11 games will use it and it could give the GTX 480 a bit more future-proofing than the HD5870. That said, DiRT 2, AvP and Metro 2033, which all use tessellation, don't show that same performance increase for the GTX 480 over the HD5870 as the Heaven 2.0 benchmark does. Those games aren't really using tessellation to the same extent as Heaven though. Benchmarks seldom really represent true gaming performance anyway, they're just pretty demos for the power of graphics card that make us go "WOW!" and are seldom matched in any games.

 

XFX Will Not Offer GeForce 470/480 Series GPUs - Says Fermi is Fermented

http://www.legitreviews.com/news/7707/

I also discovered an interesting fact about the nerve nVidia have in the same link :

by Charlie Demerjian

March 23, 2010

Nvidia world iconNVIDIA IS TWISTING the arms of e-tailers over GTX480s, forcing them to clean out the warehouses of old inventory if they want the new cards. If you want any allocations of the GTX470 or GTX480, be prepared to buy lots of low end cards.

The deal goes like this. If you want any GF100 based cards, you get them in bundles of 10 GTX470s and 10 GTX480s. For each of the bundles, you have to buy 20 G210s, 20 GT220s, 20 GT240s and 20 GTS250s. So basically you have to buy 80 old, crap parts to be eligible to receive just 20 of the newer and supposedly 'good' ones.

Jeez...after screwing up with Fermi they have the nerve to impose such conditions?? When will they learn that they are not the masters of the universe?!!

 

@pahomi - There's absolutely no way we'll ever know whether that's true or not but it wouldn't really surprise me. I'm sure all manufacturers have tried similar tactics at sometime rather than have redundant stock they cannot shift.

 

Similar to Darren i too are changing over to ATI.
I have already posted this in another thread...

Well since about 2001 and the demise of Voodoo i have been an Nvidia fan and not bought any other card for the past 5 or 6 cards.
But i hate to say, i have just bought an ATI 5870, and the reasons being...

* Same/similar performance to the 480, for £130 less.
* The 480/470 both have heat issues that 'could' reduce their life or cause troubles, and I doubt new drivers will reduce the heat that much.
* The 480/470 both have documented troubles with people running 2 monitors (like i do).
* The 480/470 seem like great cards but are way over priced.
* If in 4 or 5 months time they prove themselves then I will sell my ATI on eBay as they still bring good prices so I shouldn't lose much at all. They (the 470/480) may also come down in price and have better after market coolers.
* ATI is owned by AMD, so hopefully the driver issues of the past will be a thing of the past.

It is ordered on a next day for tomorrow.

I think that nVidia haven't been as loyal to us, as we have to them. The issues this card is reporting, the reduced spec, and the way we in the UK have been ripped off (again) is the last straw.
I have held off buying a replacement for my 8800gts since before Christmas on the strength of these new cards, but now believe the wait not worth while.
I also believe that other nVidia fans (like me) feel the same way too.

Hope i have made the right switch...