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***THE OFFICIAL GTX480/470 END USER REVIEW THREAD***

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I don't know if it has already been asked but i'll ask anyway.

Do the capacitors on these cards still squeal under load?
No squealing anymore :D only noise is when the fan hits late 70%+ then it starts to ramp up the noise a little but if you have decent air cooling in your case & apply some decent thermal paste I seriously doubt many games will ever cause the shaders to heat up enough to ramp the fan to a high speed. The thing is just idling most of the time using around 50% GPU power & still providing decent FPS :D When this becomes more available gamers are going to be really happy about how much grunt this has on stock let alone ocing ;)
 
re:

I'm sorry to say it m8, but get used to it

OcUK can only do the best they can if the stock is so constrained...

Totally understand what you are saying but my point is why do they give these dates? very annoying and just disappointing everyone who done the pre-order :(
I mean ETA dates have been given but from what we have seen it shows overclockers clearly had no idea when these cards were actually arriving and just putting false dates:confused:
Also the £458 is taken from day 1... I guess it maybe time to start thinking about given up on the pre-order and getting my money back.
Has anyone else done the same?????
Cheers
mrix
 
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Totally understand what you are saying but my point is why do they give these dates? very annoying and just disappointing everyone who done the pre-order :(
I mean ETA dates have been given but from what we have seen it shows overclockers clearly had no idea when these cards were actually arriving and just putting false dates:confused:
Also the £458 is taken from day 1... I guess it maybe time to start thinking about given up on the pre-order and getting my money back.
Has anyone else done the same?????
Cheers
mrix

They give these dates as that is the date their supplier gives them. I remember when the 5 series launched, Asus moved their delivery date about 6 times and they were 5 weeks late.
 
I've just spent the last half hour reapplying the TIMM. When I removed the heat sink there was the thinnest layer of MX-3 seemingly doing it's job of filling any voids. Anyway after cleaning I reapplied MX-3 using the single bead method and seated the heat sink. I then removed the heat sink again! Again the MX-3 seemed to be doing it's job but because the heat sink has grooves I decided to start again with AS5 which is a bit more viscous and spreadable.

I've run another test using kombustor and no discernable difference in temps. To be fair AS5 unlike MX-3 does have a curing time so time will tell!

Well now im conused. Should I use MX-3 or AS5? I have both :confused::confused::confused:
 
overclockers clearly had no idea when these cards were actually arriving and just putting false dates:confused:

OCUK, in good faith, pass on the dates given to them by the suppliers, who pass on the dates given to them by the manufacturers. it's not like there the only shop being forced to revise there ETA's as stock constraints dictate. everybody is having to shift there dates.
 
Well now im conused. Should I use MX-3 or AS5? I have both :confused::confused::confused:

LOL. I too am confused. The only thing I can say is that MX-3 doesn't have a cure time, AS5 does and there didn't seem to be any difference between the two yesterday. I can only assume, therefore, that AS5 MAY see some improvement in the next day or so....

The thing the worried me a little with MX-3 is that it was soooo thinly spread. Except where there were obvious voids and ridges you could hardly see anything. I suppose this is a good thing but I just wasn't totally convinced.
 
Do you think my corsair HX 750W ATX Modular SLI Compliant Power Supply will power 2 x 480 sli + a core i7 4ghz or would i be pushing it a bit.
 
LOL. I too am confused. The only thing I can say is that MX-3 doesn't have a cure time, AS5 does and there didn't seem to be any difference between the two yesterday. I can only assume, therefore, that AS5 MAY see some improvement in the next day or so....

The thing the worried me a little with MX-3 is that it was soooo thinly spread. Except where there were obvious voids and ridges you could hardly see anything. I suppose this is a good thing but I just wasn't totally convinced.

I'll try with MX3 and maybe put a little bit more on then
 
I got hold of my Asus GTX 480 on Wednesday, here is my thoughts on it. :)



Fermi noise and heat
- I have tried this card in two different systems and there is a massive difference between the two. When the 480 was placed in my large pc case which has really good cooling noise levels and temps were fine for gaming. It was no different to any other card and much better than my 4870x2 in terms of heat and noise.

Now I have the 480 in my htpc case which is basically setup for water cooling and only has 2 x 80mm exit fans and a newly added 1 x 92mm fan at the front. My case is sat in a semi enclosed av rack with poor airflow to the back and side of the case. Things are allot different in the htpc case. Idle temps are about 8-10c more in this htpc case and the fan after a while of gaming does get fairly loud, unlike it does in my tower case.

The fan profile is also really screwed on this card. After a period of benching or gaming the temps of course rises as does the noise of the fan. However the 480 leaves it too long before the fan spins up so the card gets hot then the fan tries to bring the temps down which brings in the noise. If the fan spun up earlier it wouldn't need to spin up as much later on to bring the temp down. Another screwed up thing about the fan profile is that as soon as the gpu load drops down so does the fan speed. What would be far better is if they kept the fan speed up for say 20 sec after the gpu load had dropped to cool the card down first. If the idle temps are say 50c and your load temps are 80c and you stop gaming it takes ages for the card to cool back down to 50c. As soon as you stop gaming the fan will ramp down and leave the gpu temp at 70c and it will take about 10 mins to get it back down to 50c. I have never seen this before in any cpu or gpu. I think the fan profile needs looking at and revising.

I think this card will act just like any other card in terms of noise and heat if you have decent air cooling setup in your case. If you dont have decent cooling in your case then things will get a bit nosier.

Ok enough on heat, noise and cooling as I will watercooling this card its not really a concern for me but I thought would share my thoughts on it.


Picture quality
- My desktop is some what brighter/slightly washed out than my ati card and looks slightly different. If I go into my drivers and turn off rgb this sorts this out and all is well.


Overscan
- One thing I have always thought that ATI did better was overscan. My tv has about 4% overscan locked on which I cant remove so I need to use the overscan features on my card. This is easy with the ATI catalyst as its just one slider. With nvidia I have two sliders and its a bit more of a pain as the silders arent locked which is a stupid idea really.

Now with ATI when I game the overscan is removed and I just loose 4% off the edge of the screen. The game still plays in 1920x1080, the same happens with movies. Not with the nvidia card. I get a weird res showing which at the moment is 1832x1022. This appears on my desktop and in gaming. I am not too happy about this really but at least everything is on the screen. I havent tried any movies to see if this weird res is applied.


Gaming
- I have only had a little mess about with games and I tried only 2 games. Solitaire and Minesweeper. Both games looked nice but lacked any dx11 effects. :D

I tried battlefield bad company and the first thing I noticed which I also noticed on my 8800gtx is how smooth the game played compared to my 4870x2. No stuttering, no flickering of textures and no vsync issues. This was maxed out with 8xMSAA. I tried 32xCSA and it was playable but the frames did drop at times which I didnt like so I just stuck with 8xMSAA. I will retry this game with 16xCSAA later today.

2nd game to try was AVP on full settings and this also ran fine and looked nice. My last card also played this game with no issues so no real difference here apart from dx11 which I couldnt really see.

DX11 benching - I ran the benchmark with tessellation on full and at 4xAA as thats what a friend of mine ran his at to compare results.

Stock clocks



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GPU core clocked to 775Ghz, memory at stock clocks



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I only messed about a little with the clocking side as it was getting late. As you can see its running at my weird messed up res.

Clocking - The Asus overvolting tool isnt that nice looking and the writing is very small unlike the MSI tool. It does how ever tell you if you have put in a wrong value and if the clock will fail or not. When I bumped the clock to 775 from 702 it said 0 errors. When I bumped the core 825 and upped the memory it said I was 30mhz out. I didnt have a clue what this meant and I went ahead regardless which ended up in a black screen and back to desktop after 3 mins of heaven. Looks like I will have to read up on this tool and how it works.


A few pics of the card in my htpc -


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I will be ripping the stock cooler off this weekend and adding an EK water block which was meant to arrive today but I missed the delivery. :rolleyes:


:)
 
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