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As video cards have grown in complexity and power consumption, so has their size. What started with small cards compared of bare chips has grown in to the modern dual-slot megacard that we’ve seen today. And it doesn’t stop there.
Within the last year in particular, manufacturers have been toying with the concept of the triple-slot card. This has come both with cards that are informally intended to use a 3rd slot such as the toasty GeForce GTX 480 (where NVIDIA highly recommends leaving the adjoining slot empty) to cards that formally take up a 3rd slot to afford bigger heatsinks and fans. With more space for cooling gear, manufactures can push more powerful cards than before thanks to the extra cooling afforded by this gear.
We have a few different triple-slot cards in-house that we’re going to be looking at over the next few weeks. But to kick things off, we decided to start small, looking at an interesting product from PowerColor that takes the triple-slot concept and attaches it to the normally cooler Raden HD 5770: PowerColor’s Radeon HD 5770 PCS+ Vortex .
After the launch of GF104 Nvidia got a real opportunity to design a dual-processor graphics card with Fermi architecture that would offer acceptable thermal and electrical specs. Our today’s article will discuss the performance of a solution like that.
New generation of professional graphics cards from Nvidia uses chips with Fermi architecture. Today we are going to introduce to you one of the new solutions, Quadro 5000 that belongs to high-performance segment and is coming to replace Quadro FX 4800.
For the launch of the first GF100-based video cards – the GTX 480 and GTX 470 – NVIDIA sent over a 3 card reviewer’s kit containing two GTX 480s and a single GTX 470. This allowed us to do SLI testing with the GTX 480 (a money-is-no-object setup) but not with NVIDIA’s significantly cheaper GTX 470. As part of a comprehensive SLI & CrossFire guide we’re working on for next month we needed a second GTX 470 for testing GTX 470 SLI operation, and MSI answered our call with their N470GTX.
Today we’ll be taking a look at MSI’s GTX 470. We’ll also be taking a sneak-peek of our forthcoming SLI/CF guide with a look at GTX 470 SLI performance.
We are going to test four Radeon HD 5870 graphics cards in CrossFireX configuration and compare them to a 3-way SLI configuration of three GeForce GTX 480 cards using the newest super-expensive mainboard with seven PCI Express slots onboard, four of which work in 16x mode.
As we have expected, GeForce GTX 465, which we have reviewed previously, did become an intermediate solution. It gave way to true Nvidia fighters intending to restore parity with AMD in the segment of affordable gaming solutions priced around $200. Please meet GeForce GTX 460 1 GB and one of the first graphics cards based on GF104 with factory overclocking in place – Gainward GTX 460 GS GLH!
We do not often get really interesting modifications of inexpensive graphics accelerators, but they are definitely of great interest to those gamers who have limited budget. Today we are going to talk about a graphics card like that.
<p><span style="font-size: small;">In the second round of the heavyweight duel the victory was awarded to the GeForce GTX 480 SLI tandem. But AMD graphics division hasn’t yet said its final word: today a tripple-GPU CrossFire configuration will try to win the leadership back.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: small;"><a target="_blank" href="http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/video/display/radeon-hd5800-3way-cf.html">Read more...</a><br />
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In 2007 we reviewed NVIDIA’s GeForce 8800 GT. At the time we didn’t know it would be the last NVIDIA GPU we would outright recommend at launch. Roughly two and a half years have elapsed since then and in that time AMD went from competitive to dominant in the marketplace. The RV670, RV770 and RV870 trilogy were all very well executed. The latter two came at a time when NVIDIA’s pricing and execution strategies took a major tumble.
Given how well AMD has executed since 2007, no one expected anything competitive from NVIDIA throughout the entire Fermi/GF100 family. Cutting down a very large, power hungry architecture wouldn’t magically produce efficient GPUs. Had NVIDIA done that, the tone of today’s GeForce GTX 460 review would’ve been very different.
Instead, NVIDIA did the unexpected. It delivered a GF100 targeted at serving the needs of the high end gamer and GPU compute user, and a reworked GF104 aimed at being a pure gaming chip for the performance mainstream segment. By pulling out ECC support entirely and significantly dropping FP64 compute power, NVIDIA freed up enough die area to add more issue and math hardware to the GF104’s SMs. The end result is a $200 - $230 part that’s better than anything else at those prices on the market today.
Yields and manufacturability, while still not great at 40nm are much better than when GF100 first launched. That combined with NVIDIA disabling some hardware on the first incarnation of the GF104 makes the GeForce GTX 460’s birth a good ol’ hard launch (at least for the 768MB version). Newegg had cards for sale several hours before the midnight NDA lift, and we had no less than 6 cards in house before our review went live.
We have two reference cards from NVIDIA (a 768MB and 1GB version), two 768MB cards from EVGA for SLI testing, a card from Zotac, and finally a card from ASUS. The EVGA GeForce GTX 460 SuperClocked is a reference design but factory overclocked. Zotac’s GeForce GTX 460 ships at stock frequencies but comes with a custom cooler. And finally ASUS’ ENGTX460 TOP 768MB is an entirely custom design running at a slight overclock with voltage controls and custom cooling.
NVIDIA is emphasizing overclocking potential of the GTX 460, which is why we see so many different versions of the card on day one of availability. The focus on factory overclocked cards, custom cooling and custom PCBs is not a coincidence. In our testing we found a least 20% headroom left on the GTX 460s we received.
<p><span style="font-size: small;"> At the very end of May we saw NVIDIA’s first effort to expand Fermi beyond the $300 space with the </span><span style="font-size: small;">GeForce GTX 465</span><span style="font-size: small;">, a further cut-down </span><span style="font-size: small;">GF100</span><span style="font-size: small;"> core priced at launch at $279. Unfortunately for NVIDIA, it wasn’t even a lackluster launch – while GF100 performs quite well with most of its functional units enabled (i.e. GTX 480), disabling additional units isn’t doing the GPU any favors. Furthermore disabling those units does little to temper the chip’s high power draw – something that’s only reasonable on the higher-end cards – resulting in a card that ate a lot of power while losing to AMD’s Radeon HD 5850.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: small;"> In short, the GTX 465 is a lesson of how you can only cut down GPU so far. NVIDIA went too far, and ended up with a part that had GTX 285 performance and GTX 470 power consumption.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: small;"> Today NVIDIA is back in the saddle with something entirely new: GF104 and the GTX 460. The second member of the Fermi family is ready for its day in the sun, and in many ways it’s nothing like we expected. Designed from the start as a smaller chip than GF100, GF104 is the basis of the GTX 460 line of products which fix the GTX 465’s ills while delivering the GTX 465’s performance. It’s what the GTX 465 should have been, and it’s priced as low as $199. And as we’ll see, it’s the first NVIDIA card in a long time that we can give a glowing review for.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: small;"><a target="_blank" href="http://www.anandtech.com/show/3809/nvidias-geforce-gtx-460-the-200-king">Read more...</a><br />
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