Gigabyte GeForce GTX 470 SOC review

Gigabyte GeForce GTX 470 SOC

But now that non-reference product from Gigabyte. As stated, Gigabyte often tries to do things a little bit different and as such puts our SKUs with some sort of unique cooling.

This GeForce GTX 470 has 448 CUDA cores, 1,280MB of GDDR5 memory and support for 3-way SLI multi-GPU setups and 3D Vision Surround. The video controller uses, obviously, a different cooling mechanism, specifically a dual-slot cooler with copper heatpipes, a copper base and three active fans.

Under SKU code GV-N470SO-13I this product features a 14 phase PWM design, OC Guru graphic card smart tuner and voltage read points.  The card comes at default with a 700 MHz core clock, a Shader Clock 1400 MHz and a Memory Clock of 3348 MHz (effective).

The card is lengthy but is compatible with ATX standard length PCB. The 14 phase PWM design includes 12 phases for the GPU, 2 for memory. For your reference, a standard GTX 470 graphics card has five power phases.

12 power phase status LED indicators indicate graphics card’s current power phase, helping users monitor power consumption. This SOC card is once again also equipped with proadlizers on graphics cards are able to provide 1.6 times purer power supply compared to traditional power design (zero proadlizers).

The NEC Proadlizer Quintuple chips show on the back side of the video card. These are said to improve ESL/ESR noise and provide a cleaner power signal to the GPU and the memory.

Courtesy of Gigabyte:

One of the quality components of Ultra Durable VGA+ is GIGABYTE’s exclusive use of proadlizers. Unlike other leading brands that only use one proadlizer on their graphic cards, GIGABYTE generously uses five units of NEC Proadlizer®, also known as film capacitor, to provide amazing current capacity up to 5000uF and extremely low ESL/ESR for super overclocking ability. Five times the regular capacitance indicates the amount of electric energy stored is fivefold. By placing five proadlizers around GPU, electric currents are able to be charged and discharged rapidly to support super overclocking activity. The quintupled proadlizers transmit more stable power even during heavy loading.

GIGABYTE proudly improves its graphics card smart tuner OC Guru. This graphics card tweaking utility puts together the best combination of software/hardware overclocking. It now features 3 profiles: OC (for overclocking mode), Gaming (for gaming mode), and Green (for power saving mode). The different modes cater to users’ different needs. GIGABYTE’s distinctive adjustable software offers gamers to adjust tuners for memory, voltage, and fan speed. OC Guru, the user-friendly software, gives hardcore gamers liberty when overclocking.

GIGABYTE’s specific voltage read point supplies hardcore gamers an ultimate benching experience at overclocking competition. Heavy users can change the voltage simply through software instead of manually adjusting any components on PCB. It is easy for overclockers to master the platform and monitor GPU workload at any time just through voltage read point.