Final Words & Conclusion

Final words and conclusion

The ASUS GeForce GTX 480 Overvolt edition is an interesting product, the new BIOS shaved of a few Degrees C in the peak temperatures keeping the product at roughly 90 Degrees C, that's a little lower but still too high. The new BIOS that NVIDIA handed out does show impriovements though.

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.

Interesting though is the ability to overclock even higher with the help of a little extra GPU voltage. We've shown you time after time, that with even a tiny bit increased Voltage on the GPU these graphics card overclock just  really well. Next to that, it scales darn good tweaked as well, you will see very significant performance increases. The tweak that we applied does have another downside, your GPU temperature will go up again rising to 93~94 Degrees C, and to compensate that  the fan RPM goes up once again as well, creating more noise. It's a tradeoff you make, but not at all a nice one.

What would have been really interesting to see however is of course the very ASUS PCB with some custom or liquid cooling slapped on top of it, honestly the sky would be the limit as right now with the reference cooler we already reached 850 MHz on that core, which certainly is very commendable. Have a peek at this review to see how incredible the results can be right here.

Right then, time to wrap it up. I'll keep saying this in each and any reference review of the series GTX 400 cards, temperatures and TDP remain trivial at best for the GTX 400 series, for some of you guys it might or might not be a concern, one fact remains, you are looking at a very fast GPU alright.

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.

Availability of the GTX 480 is getting better, and that means prices are now settling down. A product like ASUS offers here will cost you roughly 475 EUR in the shops. If you can cope with the massive heat levels and noise, then we could recommend this product. But take our advise, please do look into liquid cooling.

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