Inno3D GeForce GTX 480 iChill Black Series review

Posted by Hilbert Hagedoorn on: 06/10/2010 01:00 PM [ 0 comment(s) ]

GeForce GTX 480 Specifications

GeForce GTX 480 Specifications

Alright, let's get this article started, as always we'll have a look at Geforce GTX 480 reference (and 470 as well) specifications first.

NVIDIA released two high-end class DirectX 11 capable products. First off, the graphics adapters are of course DirectX 11 ready. With Windows 7 and Vista also being DX11 ready all we need are some games to take advantage of DirectCompute, multi-threading, Hardware Tessellation and new shader 5.0 extensions. DX11 is going to be good and once tessellation kicks into games, much better looking.

These are the bold numbers:

GeForce GTX 480 : 480 SP, 384-bit, 250W TDP, US$ 449~499
GeForce GTX 470 : 448 SP, 320-bit, 225W TDP, US$ 299~349
GeForce GTX 465 : 352 SP, 256-bit, 200W TDP, US$ 279~289

Some of you will say "huh?" as everybody expected 512 shader processors on the top of the line model, 272 cores more than the GT200 (GeForce GTX 280/285). We were as much surprised as you guys when we learned that it turned out to be 480 shader processors for the GeForce GTX 480. See, the Fermi architecture, the GF100 graphics processor has sixteen shader clusters embedded in it (called SMs). For the GeForce GTX 480 one such a cluster is disabled, and on the GeForce GTX 470 (though expected) two are disabled.

GeForce GTX series 400

As to why one SM is disabled on the GeForce GTX 480, we can only speculate. But we have reason to believe that NVIDIA did this to secure better yields and ramp volume production up. Also, much like the GeForce GTX 260 SP216, for the future to be able to introduce a slightly faster SKU with the full 512 SPs. The reality remains that it will not matter 'heaps' in terms of performance as you lose only one-sixteenth of shader performance.

The GeForce GTX 400 cards have the Fermi family chip embedded on them. That chip is called GF100. The GF100 GPU is placed onto an 8-layer PCB and tied to gDDR5 memory. On the topic of graphics memory; NVIDIA made their memory controller GDDR5 compatible, which was not the case on GT200 based GeForce GTX 260/275/285/295, hence their GDDR3 memory.

Memory wise expect large, exemplary large numbers, as we are passing 1 GB. Each utilized memory controller on the respective GPU will get 256MB of memory tied to it.

The GTX 470 has five memory controllers (5x256MB) = 1280 MB of GDDR5 memory
The GTX 480 has six memory controllers (6x256MB) = 1536 MB of GDDR5 memory

As you can understand, the massive memory partitions, bus-width and combination of GDDR5 memory (quad data rate) allows the GPU to work with a very high framebuffer bandwidth. So we had a chat about the GF100 GPU and memory. It's now time to break down the GPU clocks:

	GeForce 9800 GTX	GeForce GTX 285	GeForce GTX 295	GeForce GTX 470	GeForce GTX 480
Stream (Shader) Processors	128	240	240 x2	448	480
Core Clock (MHz)	675	648	576	607	700
Shader Clock (MHz)	1675	1476	1242	1215	1400
Memory Clock (effective MHz)	2200	2400	2000	3350	3700
Memory amount	512 MB	1024 MB	1792 MB	1280	1536
Memory Interface	256-bit	512-bit	448-bit x2	320-bit	384-bit
Memory Type	gDDR2	gDDR3	gDDR3	gDDR5	gDDR5
HDCP	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Two Dual link DVI	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
HDMI	No	No	No	Yes	Yes

Inno3D altered a thing or two though ...

Inno3D GeForce GTX 480 iChill Black Series

23 pages 1 2 3 4 next »

Inno3D GeForce GTX 660 Ti iChill review
In this review we'll look at the GeForce GTX 660 Ti from Inno3D, it's their all new GeForce GTX 660 Ti iCHILL version and to date is one of the most impressive graphics cards in the 660 Ti range we have tested.

Inno3D GeForce GTX 580 OC review
We review the Inno3D GeForce GTX 580OC. Despite a very high price tag the product seems to become a nice success. As such directly at launch several models based of this SKU where already announced, e.g. the regular clocked models, factory higher clocked models, liquid cooled models. This OC edition, in particular this is a reference GeForce GTX 580 that has been clocked faster to 820 MHz on the core where it also welcomes a nice bump on the overall memory frequency.

Inno3D GeForce GTX 460 OC review
We test and review the Inno3D GeForce GTX 460 OC. The Inno3D GeForce GTX 460 OC model we test today flexes the GPU and memory muscle all the way up towards a rocking core of 750MHz, the shaders to 1500 MHz and the GDDR5 to 3800 MHz (effective). Armed with a 2-year limited warranty, Inno3D is trying real hard to not only bring a nice custom board to the market, but tries to release pre-overclocked models at a fairly normal pricing, yet with a hefty overclock. And whenever there's 'overclock' in the branding .. there is of course Guru3D.com

Inno3D GeForce GTX 480 iChill Black Series review
We test and review the Inno3D GeForce GTX 480 iChill Black Series. This GeForce GTX 480 graphics card is liquid cooled. With a liquid cooled loop you can bring down temperatures towards roughly 50 Degrees (under full load), that's roughly 40 degrees less than the reference cooler offers. Obviously you'll need a proper water-cooling setup to add this card to but yeah, today we'll review the i-ChiLL GeForce GTX 480 Black Series equipped with a liquid cooling block. In the package we'll spot a "full cover" water-block that is responsible for cooling down the GPU, Voltage Regulators, I/O chip, memory modules, and other critical components.