Thursday, March 18th 2010
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 480 Reference Design Card Final Design Pictured
Many would be familiar with these pictures of a generic graphics card based on NVIDIA's GF100 GPU which was spotted at this year's CES. A company slide sourced by DonanimHaber reveals the final iteration of NVIDIA's reference design GeForce GTX 480 graphics accelerator, and what it looks like from the outside. A set of slightly more recent pictures showed its cooling assembly from inside. The protruding heat pipes intrigued us as they were inconsistent with the cooling assembly on the card NVIDIA showed off at CES, which we then believed to be the top-end GTX 480 part. The company slide confirms what the cooling assembly looks like when it's all put together.
The cooler is highly ventilated, with vents all over the cooler's shroud. There are vents on the top, on the sides, apart from the usual obverse fan air intake. To increase its intake, the PCB is further cut to help draw air from the reverse-side of the PCB. The cooler's four large (we reckon 8 mm thick) heat pipes protrude about a centimeter out of the card's periphery, increasing its height by that much. The cooler itself respects the 2-slot thickness limit which is most conventional. A table in the slide also confirms some details we already know: the card has 1536 MB of GDDR5 memory across a 384-bit wide interface. It has a TDP of under 300W, which a recent report reveals to be a hairbreadth under 300W, at 296W. Power is drawn in from an 8-pin and a 6-pin PCI-E power connector. The card is 10.5 inches long, the same length as its reference-design GeForce GTX 280. The card supports 3-way SLI. It will be unveiled on the 26th of March.
Source:
DonanimHaber
The cooler is highly ventilated, with vents all over the cooler's shroud. There are vents on the top, on the sides, apart from the usual obverse fan air intake. To increase its intake, the PCB is further cut to help draw air from the reverse-side of the PCB. The cooler's four large (we reckon 8 mm thick) heat pipes protrude about a centimeter out of the card's periphery, increasing its height by that much. The cooler itself respects the 2-slot thickness limit which is most conventional. A table in the slide also confirms some details we already know: the card has 1536 MB of GDDR5 memory across a 384-bit wide interface. It has a TDP of under 300W, which a recent report reveals to be a hairbreadth under 300W, at 296W. Power is drawn in from an 8-pin and a 6-pin PCI-E power connector. The card is 10.5 inches long, the same length as its reference-design GeForce GTX 280. The card supports 3-way SLI. It will be unveiled on the 26th of March.
137 Comments on NVIDIA GeForce GTX 480 Reference Design Card Final Design Pictured
and I can't see overclocking 1 470 to match 1 GTX480
I'm just sad because I can think of nothing to justify the power consumption to me.
I thought nvidia had 40nm down but it seems that they didn't learn enough with the GT21X cards to me.
But yea its going to use some power, we new that, stop acting like its some thing big.
If your runing SLI on a GT200 or better card you can bet you need a good PSU, the days of 400-500watt PSU are over, if you want the best you have to feed it.
I'm interested in what the GTX470's power consumption is, as I have a feeling it will be closer to the HD5870 numbers in both power consumption and performance(and hopefully price).
fail fail fail.
With such a high Power consumption, OC will be limited and the board will be way too hot anyway. This is just a generation to skip. I bet ATI will murder the GTX 4xx series at launch with price-drops and neat-future products announcements. It's about time for HD6000 or HD5890, is it ? lol
If Nv has lower prices, ATI will do a sudden price drop to beat them in sales, and when sales die off they'll release the new refresh at roughly the prices the previous cards were at prior to the drop (like they did with 4870 - dropped from $300 au to $200 au, then the 4890 came out around $300 au)
I think the estimate of 296W in the article is probably quite accurate. Anyways, it will be between 290-300.
So the next step... What about the dual GPU of them ?
Will be two GTX 470 or 480 in single PCB ?
Now, if performance of 480 is only 15% more than 5870, with 150% transistors, and 150% power consumption, there's a HUGE issue here. If it gets 150% of 5870, or even 140%, pricing wars will ensue. Everyone better cross thier finger that it's the latter, and not the former.