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The short story about the woefully delayed GTX480, and it's little sibling the GTX470 is that it is far slower than Nvidia has been hinting at, and there is a lot of work yet to be done before it is salable. Our sources have a bit of conflicting data, but the vast majority of the numbers line up between them.
Small numbers of final cards have started to trickle in to Nvidia, and they are only showing it to people they consider very friendly for reasons that we will make clear in a bit. Because of the small circle of people who have access to the data we are going to blur a few data points to protect our sources. That said, on with the show.
There are two cards, the GTX480 having the full complement of 512 shaders, and the GTX470 with 448. The clocks for the 480 are either 600 or 625MHz for the low/half clock, and double that, 1200 or 1250MHz for the high/hot clock. Nvidia was aiming for 750/1500MHz last spring, this is a huge miss. This speed is the first point the sources conflict on, and it could go either way, both sources were adamant on theirs being the correct final clock. *SIGH*.
On the GTX470 side, there are 448 shaders, and the clocks are set at 625/1250MHz in both cases. If the GTX480 is really at 600/1200MHz, and the GTX470 is slightly faster, it should really make you wonder about the thermals of the chip. Remember when we said that the GF100/GTX480 chip was having problems with transistors at minimal voltages? Basically Nvidia has to crank the voltages beyond what they wanted to keep borderline transistors from flaking out. The problem is that this creates heat, and a lot of it. Both of our sources said that their cards were smoking hot, one said they measured it at 70C at idle on the 2D clock.
The fans were reported to be running at 70% of maximum when idling, a number that is far far to high for normal use. Lets hope that this is just a BIOS tweaking issue, and the fans don't need to be run that fast, it would mean GF100 basically can't downvolt at all on idle. On the up side, the noise from the fans at that speed was said to be noticeable, but not annoying.
If you are wondering why Nvidia made such a big deal about GTX480/GF100 certified cases, well, now you know. Remember, higher temps mean more leakage, which means more heat, and then the magic smoke that makes transistors work gets let out in a thermal runaway. You simply have to keep this beast cool all the time.
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The GTX480 with 512 shaders running at full speed, 600 or 625MHz depending on which source, ran on average 5% faster than a Cypress/HD5870, plus or minus a little bit. The sources were not allowed to test a GTX470 which is likely an admission that it will be slower than Cypress/5870.
There is one bright spot, and it is a very bright spot indeed. No, not the thermal cap of the chip, but the tessellation performance in Heaven. On that synthetic benchmark, the numbers were more than twice as fast as the HD5870/Cypress, and will likely beat a dual chip HD5970/Hemlock. The sources said that this lead was most definitely not reflected in any game or test they ran, it was only in tessellation limited situations where the shaders don't need to be used for 'real work'.
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Hoffe das wir dann ende März "echte" Reviews und keine Nvidia gesteuerten sehen werden.
