The Zotac GeForce GTX 480 comes as a bit of a surprise in the sense that the new BIOS works out better Bit it remains to be a rather noisy card when in use, the new BIOS that NVIDIA handed out seems to have shaved off another seven degrees C on the peak temperature, and that's without compromising on the noise levels (which remain high though). But yea, slowly but steadily the product is looking better alright without us feeling the need to continuously discuss the same clichés.

Performance wise we obviously have nothing to complain about, whatever game you play, you'll play it at the highest image quality settings and the most extravagant resolutions. If we take Battlefield Bad Company 2 for example, we enable everything we can to the highest image quality settings, fire off DirectX 11 and  8x AA and then in 1920x1200 we still average out at 55 FPS, which is certainly sweet

Colin McRae DiRT 2 then, we again enable everything we can, fire off DX11 mode and 8xAA and still see a whopping 57 FPS at 2560x1600. So there's nothing wrong with baseline performance, no Sir.

Now obviously the overall performance is exactly the same as the reference product with a minor anomaly here in there in the overall results though. Not a MHz on this card is different compared to reference clock frequencies. The overall bundle that Zotac delivers I even like to call a little sober, you receive the basics and especially at this price level we like to see a game included or at least a little something extra. What Zotac does really well though is their extended warranty, as you will receive a 5-year warranty on this product, and that makes up for a lot alright. Don't forget to register at their website within 14-days after purchasing though, as that is a mandatory requirement, if you are too late you'll fall back to two-years warranty.

So there you have it you guys, temperatures and TDP remain trivial at best for the GTX 400 series, but for most of you guys that probably is not much of a concern and the  fact remains, you are certainly looking at the fastest GPUs on the block. Additional benefits when purchasing an NVIDIA card is of course PhysX which definitely is gaining more ground since the last year. It's a nice feature to have, sure... CUDA, we haven't talked about it much just yet. But obviously the GF100 GPUs are fully CUDA ready, in fact the architecture was designed with CUDA in mind. On the compute side of things we know one thing for sure, the GF100 should be impressive.

The biggest problem with the GeForce GTX 480 however remains it's price level, the Zotac GeForce GTX 480 is available for a steep 499 US / 499 EUR in the shops. The extended warranty is the icing on the cake here, so if you are in the market for a GeForce GTX 480, we can certainly recommend this one. And and hey .. do look into liquid cooling we say.

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