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What are the drawbacks of getting a GTX480?

macmodder

macmodder

macmodder

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19 Jan 2011
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I'm currently putting together my new rig, And I was looking at spending around £200 on the GPU, which led me to the 560Ti. However I saw that the gigabyte 480 is only £200 and the OC version is only £215. Would you suggest I went for a 480 over a 560Ti?

Rough specs (not all finalized yet):

i7 2600k
Asus Sabertooth p67
7 x 120mm Cooler Master Sicklefow (4 intake, 3 exhaust)
Corsair h50 for the CPU (or maybe h60 when it comes out)

I suspect my monitor will be fairly normal sized, maybe 1920 X 1080

p.s. it's a custom case and due to an error of judgement it won't fit ATI cards, so it's got to be NVidia
 
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No down sides at all with a GTX480, even the heat and noise issues are non-existent with the special Gigabyte version with custom cooler.
 
480 GTX is more powerful than a 560Ti. I'm not sure by how much but I'd expect it to be a fair margin. 480 GTX sucks a load of power and can be quite noisy, whereas the 560 doesn't and isn't so much.

480 GTX is a lot of graphics pushing power for the price and they are heavily reduced from the original £400+ price tag because they didn't sell very well and they have a lot of redundant stock no one wanted, plus they are now superseeded by the 580gtx.
 
Load power consumption. Pulls in nearly half a kilowatt on some benchies. You could watercool it and connect the rad up to your central heating system, bypass the combi boiler so you'd save some costs here ;)
 
The ONLY drawback of a 480 is power useage if you get the Gigabyte SE version.

Remember the extra VRAM too with the 480. Having 1.5GB over 1GB is highly benefical these days if you want to max out settings in some games @1080p.
 
The soc tends to be quite fussy with psu's though, some 1000w ones can't even power it without artifacts where as some people have no problems with a 600w one.
 
GTX 480 is basically a GTX 570 with more memory/memory bandwidth, so it is obviously faster than a 560.

So, the power consumption of the SE ought to be between the 580 and the 570. Best card for the price at the moment

I wouldn't lose sleep over it not fitting ATI cards. 480 is better than both 6950 and 6970

If your PSU can't source 850w+ of power then just dont run Furmark. (Dont run furmark-type programs either way. Pointless)
 
tommybhoy said:
The soc tends to be quite fussy with psu's though, some 1000w ones can't even power it without artifacts where as some people have no problems with a 600w one.
Click to expand...

Some of the SOCs have been faulty, simple as that.

It's now about the same price as the SE so personally I would get one over the SE and underclock it rather than the other way around.
 
The reference 480s are hot, loud and suck a lot of juice. The gigabyte 480 sorts out the heat and noise problems with a damn good cooler with three fans on it, although it does use a lot of power (450w load, at stock).
If put into a pecking order would suggest a Gigabyte 480 over a 6950, a 6950 over a reference 480, and any of the above over a 560. The 560 is currently in the wrong price bracket, it needs to lose another 30 quid before becoming competitive.
 
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If power is a problem http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=GX-112-MS&groupid=701&catid=1914&subcat=1010

This thing is a 570 for the old 480 SOC price of £239.99. 570 performs slightly better on DX11 and 480 performs slightly better on DX10. 570 is also more power efficient though i am not sure exactly how this compares to the improved 480 SE.


straxusii said:
Some of the SOCs have been faulty, simple as that.

It's now about the same price as the SE so personally I would get one over the SE and underclock it rather than the other way around.
Click to expand...

It's still about 15 quid cheaper
 
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Options at the moment really are 480gtx SE gigabyte, the OC version is a waste of cash, every penny more is one penny more for an IDENTICAL card.

Would you go to another store if OCUK sold the SOC version for £240 and somewhere else had it for £242, what if they had it for £200. The SOC has a different bios, thats ALL, you do not cherry pick or massively bin cores when 99.9% of the cores do the speeds, ok, 90% of the cores, theres literally no point. Binning thousands of cores costs a shedload more than RMA'ing a half dozen cards.

So 480gtx SE at what £200, or a 6950 for about the same price, some less, not sure if the cheap ones unlock, I'd assume they'll be newer not so good rev 2 versions but you never know.

Those are THE two value choices right now, the only reason to consider a 570gtx is if you're sli'ing and ONLY if two 480gtx's would push you into power problems with PSU, and heat is a problem, they still throw out a lot of heat, there isn't a case out there that can't deal with ones heat inside a case, in sli, I can imagine all that heat could be come a slight issue, a big issue in some cases but a decent case shouldn't have too many problems with it.
 
The only real disadvantages with the Gigabyte GTX 480s is you need a beefy powersupply and the card tends to dump a lot of heat in the case(although some is exhausted out the back, but not as much as a traditional blower would). This positives far outway the cons of the reference card though.
 
Higher power draw, that's about it (with regard to the SE and SOC). If it was a reference 480 then greater heat and noise would apply.
 
My whole system pulls no more then 420watts with my gtx 480 at 860mhz. Around 400watts on heaven benchmark but my i7 920 only using 1.0v @ 3.5.
 
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