Final words and conclusion

Final words and conclusion

Everybody knows and understands that the GeForce GTX 470/480 series needs proper cooling. We've been saying it from the get-go, we especially are very charmed by liquid cooling solutions on these products as it allows you to bring your graphics card to an entirely new dimension.

What Palit brought to the table is an interesting attempt to battle the reference cooler from NVIDIA. Admittedly, they succeeded, but not by a a huge margin. Though acceptable, this dual-fan cooler is slightly less loud then the reference cooler. If we look at cooling performance, well that's where the product does make a bit of a difference as temperatures under real heavy load hovers at roughly 80 degrees C. But I was kind of hoping that the cooling solution would be a tad less loud. Anyhow, it's not bothersome for the majority of end-users though. The audiophile crown however would be disappointed.

The card itself behaved quite well, the new series 257 drivers from NVIDIA certainly gave the GTX 470 a little boost in performance. What surprised me is that the product hasn't been clocked higher at default. As you have been able to see in our overclock session, the overclock potential of this card is really grand. Just grab a tool like AfterBurner which works fine with this card, give it a little extra voltage if you desire to do so, increase fan RPM a little and then the sky is the limit. We broke 800 MHz on the core without too much hassle, that is 1600 MHz on the shader domain and the memory overclock wasn't shoddy either. Once you do overclock, and especially with some added GPU juice, the temps will rise to 90 degrees C fairly quickly. But hey, whether or not you are willing to live with that is your call to make though.

From what we measured, this card consumes roughly 225 Watts when 100% utilized, compared to the competition that's too high, but we discussed the Fermi TDP many times already, nothing new there.

So overall we like what Palit did here, the custom cooler could have been a notch better but we certainly noticed the improvement. The biggest difficulty obviously remains ATI, lined up against the GTX 470 would be the Radeon HD 5850 which can be purchased at 250~ 275 EUR these days saving you almost 50 EUR while consuming less power with its TDP at 170W. That product simply makes more sense at that price. You'd forfeit on PhysX and CUDA though, sure, we can't deny that ATI has the better hand overall.

Whatever your choice may be, we feel that Palit put a really nice product onto the market, if priced right we can definitely recommend it to you, and IF you decide to go crazy and slap some liquid cooling on there, I guarantee you that you'll have a blast tweaking and overclocking this product.

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