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In the first round of the fight between contemporary multi-GPU heavyweights GeForce GTX 470 SLI tandem won. Today we are going to find out how much faster a configuration of two GeForce GTX 480 graphics cards will be.
Radeon HD 5970 has long remained the leader among gaming graphics accelerators. Today it is facing a very dangerous rival – GeForce GTX 470 SLI tandem that may be a sign of the arrival of a new dual-GPU Nvidia graphics card.
<p><span style="font-size: small;">Sapphire is bringing a constant stream of passively cooled 5xxx series GPUs to the market – if you recall, we reported on the Sapphire HD5550 Ultimate only a couple of months ago. This time, they have another iteration to introduce to the market – the HD5670. With HDMI, Dual-Link DVI and DisplayPort connections, the card will support three monitors in an ATI Eyefinity configuration with a suitable DisplayPort monitor or active display adapter. DirectX 11 and CrossFireX support comes as standard.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: small;"><a target="_blank" href="http://www.anandtech.com/show/3785/sapphire-hd5670-ultimate-announced">Read more...</a><br />
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In this corner, weighing in at nearly eight pounds…
One of the benefits of reviewing desktop hardware is the way PCs tend to come together like a combination of Lego bricks. Individual components are typically fairly easy to test against each other, often requiring as little as a simple swap. While notebooks have made great strides in becoming more customizable, testing mobile video hardware can still be a mess. That's why we're fortunate that Clevo produces a notebook capable of supporting top-of-the-line graphics solutions from both AMD and NVIDIA camps, and we're doubly fortunate that AVADirect was kind enough to send us not one but two of their builds based on the Clevo W860CU.
These laptops are configured absolutely identically except for a crucial difference: one is equipped with NVIDIA's flagship GeForce GTX 285M, and the other with AMD's flagship Mobility Radeon HD 5870. These are the fastest (current) single chip mobile graphics solutions from either vendor. NVIDIA just announced their upcoming GeForce GTX 480M, which will boost performance (and power consumption) and very likely take a clear lead over today's combatants, but we'll hold off on saying more about the 480M until we can actually get one for testing.
In recent years it’s become customary to have 3-4 high-end cards on the market at the same time using the same GPU. For the GTX 200 series we had the GTX 260, GTX 275, and GTX 285, while for the Radeon HD 5000 series we have the 5830, 5850, and 5870. With the launch of NVIDIA’s GTX 400 series last month NVIDIA filled in the first 2 spots in their lineup with the GTX 480 and GTX 470, with obvious room to grow out the family in the future.
Above the GTX 480 is of course the “full” GF100 with all of its functional units enabled, and which is still missing in action on both the consumer and HPC markets. However there’s also room for a card below the $350 GTX 470, particularly with AMD being the sole inhabitant of the “bargain” high-end $300 point. NVIDIA is to the point in the Fermi rollout where they want a piece of that market, and they have a stash of further-binned so-so GF100 chips they want to fill it with. This brings us to today, and the launch of the GeForce GTX 465.
Nvidia didn’t stop at launching GeForce GTX 480/470 solutions and very soon will expand their DirectX 11 family with one more mode. We will try to find out how promising the new products called GeForce GTX 465 actually looks.
<p><span style="font-size: small;">Today NVIDIA announced their latest mobile GPU, the GTX 480M. Based on the GF100 (Fermi) architecture, this will be a fully featured mobile counterpart rather than the "outdated" architectures we've seen with previous mobile GPUs (i.e. GTX 280M vs. GTX 280). Perhaps most shocking of all is that the GeForce GTX 480M should start appearing in notebooks next month, and we'll see SLI configurations at some point as well. NVIDIA has partnered with Clevo for this launch, and they're looking to give notebook gaming the biggest performance increase we've seen in a long time.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: small;"><a target="_blank" href="http://www.anandtech.com/show/3740/nvidia-announces-gtx-480m">Read more...</a><br />
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Fans of custom video cards have undoubtedly found themselves a bit disappointed with the Radeon HD 5800 series. Due to a perfect storm of low GPU yields from TSMC and NVIDIA’s late arrival with the GTX 400 series, the first 6 months for the 5800 series was nothing other than bonkers. AMD was selling GPUs to their partners as fast as they could come out of TSMC, and their partners were selling finished boards to OEMs and-end users alike as fast as they could be assembled. Even at prices over MSRP, the 5800 series flew off the shelves, leaving AMD’s partners with little-to-no supply of GPUs to tinker with. Custom 5800 series cards effectively took a 6 month vacation.
That wait finally came to an end in the Spring of 2010, as an increase in GPU supplies allowed AMD’s partners to catch their breathes and focus on their custom cards. With 6 months under their belts AMD’s partners were able to come up with a variety of designs for their custom cards, and today we’re going to be looking at a trio of custom Radeon HD 5870s: Sapphire’s Radeon HD 5870 Toxic 2GB, MSI’s Radeon HD 5870 Lightning, and Gigabyte’s Radeon HD 5870 Super Overclock.
<p><span style="font-size: small;">Power and heat output are often issues which stride the minds of graphics card enthusiasts. Sufficient cooling and a beefy power supply are often a prerequisite if one wishes to invest in NVIDIA’s latest Fermi offering. So what happens when we catch word of a single slot graphics card containing a Fermi GPU ?</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: small;">Hot on the heels of Galaxy’s custom GTX470 GC, the GTX470 Razor (or ‘Katana’ in Japan) is set to be officially launched at Computex 2010, and looks like the bigger brother of the Galaxy GTX260+ Razor, released in September 2009.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: small;"><a href="http://www.anandtech.com/show/3731/news-a-single-slot-gtx-470-from-galaxy" target="_blank">Read more...</a><br />
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After several delays the new generation of powerful Nvidia graphics cards has finally seen the light of day and now the graphics giants can finally compete on equal terms. Let’s find out how good the praised Fermi architecture really is with the help of GeForce GTX 480 ad GTX 470 based products from Gigabyte.