Right heres my own mini review of the 480...
Because I bought a 480 to play around with (in pic below) .... and it's going back.
It's not a bad card though, it's just not as good as it could or should be.
Wanted to see for myself how it compared to my 5870's... as expected it's just too noisey and hot, and because of this it's also affecting my overclock. Can get 4.26GHz stable on the Intel 980X with dual 5870's, but have to drop 200MHz with a single 480 installed. Unacceptable.
As usual though, NV's drivers are better, frames rates are more consistent, and minimum frame rates are better. Generally less issues with games and the GPU accelerated software that i also use. It's funny, because it's taken ATI about 7 months to get there 5870 drivers upto NV's release drivers for the 480. I very nearly got rid of the 5870's because of the drivers, for the first 3 months after the cards release even getting them to install could be a problem. Then there was other things like BFBC2 flickering with Crossfire, Adobe Flash GPU acceleration issues, second monitor flickering when OC-ing a card even by 1MHz, software problems, and lots of other stuff. But now they are
finally acceptable and 99% of these things have been fixed.
The only real issue i have left with ATI drivers, is that when you force AA on in the CCC it does not work with
many games, especially with Crossfire, with NV it will nearly always work.
The single 480 card often nearly matches my Crossfire 5870's in many DX11 demos with tessellation. And the more RAM seemed to give less random stutters (when textures/areas are being loaded at that start of some games or during gameplay for instance). Game loading may have been slightly faster too, but not as much as going from a 512MB to 1GB card.
Would have been a great card thats definitely better than the 5870 if it wasn't for the heat and noise. Personally i'm not bothered about power draw. A better cooler or water cooling is an option, but too much money and i'd have to have a seperate water kit as i wouldn't add it to my current one that cools the CPU - that would add too much extra heat to the loop. And i dont think any fan cooler will cool it enough to allow me to OC my system as high as before.
Also miss the Display Port output thats on the 5870's.
I've had
every single ATI and NV card over the last 9 years (apart from NV 5xxx series, and ATI 2xxx series, both = FAIL).
So i can say this with no doubt... The image quality is slightly better with the ATI cards, but
not in games (how they render the pixels, theres no real difference here with either company these days, although NV do have better AA), but i mean generally with colour vibrancy and the whites - they are just whiter and brighter with ATI cards, and the colours more vibrant, no amount of tweaking with a NV card has got it as good as ATI.
While on this subject, all NV cards older than the 200 series have inferior colour output - it's a lot like they cant do as many colours, the colour transitions are not as smooth, and the whites are dull.
This is all stuff you never really see mentioned in reviews for some reason... but others on forums have mentioned this. You do need a good monitor to notice this stuff though, some cheap LCD with a TN panel probably wont show it, while PVA/MVA panels can just begin to show it, and with an IPS panel you really notice it.
Basically the 480 is great if you water cool it of get a better cooler. Most people already knew that though.
Cant be arsed to do benches, i've got work to do. But you all know how they perform anyway...
i've not OC'ed his system much, so it should be fine for him and he dont care about noise.
