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ZOTAC GeForce GTX 480 SLI

W1zzard

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Today we have on our testbench two NVIDIA GeForce GTX 480 accelerators. Just the graphics cards alone will cost you $1000. Is this something that can be justified? Performance aside, what's going on with power and heat when running two of these cards?

Show full review
 
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qubit

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Awesome, nice! :D
 

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Rapes all other cards in terms of power and power consumption. I am amazed it has more price/perf compared to GT210. I am also surprised by the fact that W1zzard's house is still around, 472w peak?! 103w at idle is also excessive, seeing that 5770 takes in 112w max. Industry standard review as always.
 

W1zzard

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Once again great job w1zz...Cant believe it really dosent scale as much as a 5970 even though it does own all.
 
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Great Job! I noticed temps are much better and ~10 degrees lower did Nvidia increase the fan speed? Are any noise updates to follow?
 
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' Industry standard review as always.' I second that, very detailed review!

It becomes clear that in a high resolution scenario, there is nothing as powerfull as 2 480's. These cards fly away at max res.

But they still are non adequate for a mainstream, even freak gamer, unless you traffic with drugs or weapons.
 
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Man, that's some impressive scaling.. Nearly 100% in Clear Sky at 2560x1600. Wow.
 
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Holy Scale-Ability Batman! SLI Finally pays off!

Highlight of the article:

 

W1zzard

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the54thvoid

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Any chance of the usual decibel levels being depicted - we know it'l be loud, we just want to know how loud.

Also, are there any tri crossfire 5850 reviews out there so i can compare?

And finally, good review and tells it how it is. Uber powerful but at a considerable and frankly 'not worth paying' cost.
 
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Nice review!
Tnks!!!!

Now, to much power to feed this SLI! :S
Higher perfomance
Higher consume
Higher price
 
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Nice review. Wizzard any chance of getting some benchmarks on BF Bad Company 2?
Also I am wondering what was max power consumption of the whole system ? :)
 

cadaveca

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Scaling is pretty good for that much gpu power. I'm shocked, actually...
 
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These cards just seems like overkill - for most applications and games a 5870 or 5970 works fine
 
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Nice review.
 

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The cards alone draw 600W? Whoosh!

Insane amounts of power though.
 
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fatguy1992

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Good review, my only comment is that maybe that 3.8GHz i7 is bottlenecking the higher end cards in some benchmarks, mainly 3D mark.
 
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WIN: Nvidia has finally improved SLI-scaling to a level where it's pretty damn respectable -- I got to give them props for that.

FAIL: Two GTX 480's are only 13% faster than a 5970, yet they draw nearly twice the power. There's something really wrong with that. What the hell is a dual-GTX 480 going to look like? Three PCB's, one just for the power circuits? Is it even possible?

Good review, my only comment is that maybe that 3.8GHz i7 is bottlenecking the higher end cards in some benchmarks, mainly 3D mark.

Yeah, Wiz, your puny 3.8GHz Core i7 is making other review sites laugh at us -- we demand a LN2-cooled 7.0GHz PhenomII right away.
 

Fourstaff

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Yeah, Wiz, your puny 3.8GHz Core i7 is making other review sites laugh at us -- we demand a LN2-cooled 7.0GHz PhenomII right away.

Bad move, he will just pack up and leave, leaving us with no more reviews :(
 

fatguy1992

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Yeah, Wiz, your puny 3.8GHz Core i7 is making other review sites laugh at us -- we demand a LN2-cooled 7.0GHz PhenomII right away.

I think a 4.2GHz-4.4GHz bloomfield or guftown would do just fine. But i'm sure that would be heaps of work to re-test with so many gpus.
 
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