GeForce GTX 480 (Story)

Hi, i thought i would enter this forum with at least something interesting.

 

 

Well this is not a question, more of a testimonial to what would be one of the most under-rated cards ever.

 

I have owned mine for 3 years now, it is the EVGA SSC model, and i have it under a custom air cooler, the Gelid Icy Vision.

 

Image:

At stock speeds, it is nothing more than a 480, or 570 with a larger bus width yada yada yada...

 

The masterpiece behind this card is it's overclocking headroom.

 

 

Here is a GPU-Z Validation of my 480: http://www.techpowerup.com/gpuz/v8m2x/

 

Here is my card running stable with Vsync on in BF3 at 920/1840/1900 @ 1188MV on air ( this video is an old one of mine)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=Xre8v6ykBB0

 

Now yes, this proves stability, but it is not much to go by as to what it did for performance gains...Well i can tell you this, the GTX 580 is at 772mhz stock with 4000mhz memory... this is how it gains it's lead over the 480, the cuda cores do not add much at all, around 5% at the same clocks..

 

Now at 800mhz, a 480 will match a standard GTX 580.

Now you can begin to imagine what a 480 can do above 800mhz.....

 

Here is my 
Unigene heaven 3.0 run on both stock and overclocked clocks. (overclocked is only 880mhz in these results)

 

Here is a video i did of the difference between overclocked and stock (recording puts added strain on the hardware, and is not representative of the final scores)- See pictures below for true results.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OUzXGBZyUVM

 

Stock 700mhz 480 clock

 

 880mhz OC 480

 

Same settings with 8xMSAA

 

All maxed out with Extreme Tesselation and 8xMSAA

 

 

 

All of the overclocked results above, tie and beat the Radeon 7950....

 

Now, i was thinking of upgrading, but i really have no need to.

We all know how hot 480's run under it's standard cooler, but not a lot was tested with overclocking and other cooling methods....

Well, here i sit typing up about a now 3 Generation old GPU..... but does that matter?

 

The EVGA GTX 480 can be had for as little as 150 pounds here in the UK over at www.scan.co.uk, but is in line with a few other cards, specifically AMD's GCN 7850 and 7870, but the 7850 is a great overclocker, and guzzles less gas.... it however does not have the stuff that comes with a GPU from Nvidia (we know that tech)and it also does not give you the fun a 480 will.

 

All i will say is, power consumption is not a massive deal, and heat can be sorted if you have the know how...

 

The cooler i use was 25 pounds from www.scan.co.uk and keeps this behemoth of a chip cool under all conditions.

 

What i meant earlier by the fun part, the 480 is a beast that will spit fire at you under it's standard configuration (neglect from Nvidia) , but as soon as you give it some love( a capable cooler).... it comes back with gift after gift, and this is what made it my most favorite and best GPU i have ever owned, the amount of performance untapped in Fermi is quite astounding.....

The 580 was and is the better card, but it was nothing more than the unlocked Fermi core.... it still sucks power like the 480, and in fact runs hotter...

The 580's secret is throttling, and a much better cooler, consisting of a Vapour chamber cooler, much like the one in the Nvidia Titan.

 

 

 

Anyway, this is my story/rant, cheers for listening.

 

 

-Recon.

 

 

I agree a very nice card for the money. A little power hungry but a larger power supply will fix that. Nice benchmarks! 

I have a 480 myself and I love it. I never heard of the OC potential of the card though. Now you got me thinking about getting an aftermarket cooler for my reference EVGA 480 so I can actually get some overclocking done on it.

Definitely worth it if you do not fancy upgrading yet, just make sure your PSU can push the card when overclocked, with voltage it will easily surpass 300 watts.

 

 

I have a 850 watt PSU so I should be fine. Could you post some more temps as well?

Overclocking scales really well with the GTX480. Not to mention driver updates really improved the performance of the card. Since GTX580/570 everyone seem to forget the GTX400 series.

I read an article about GTX480 being 40% faster than HD5870 with the "latest" Nvidia driver (few months after Kepler launch I believe). Amazing to think of how much juice Nvidias' driver development team can squeeze out of a 3 year old GPU.

Temps for my 880mhz with 1138mv clock -75c max in gaming conditions.

850mhz with 1075mv -70c max in gaming conditions.

 

Do remember if you test with Furmark or OCCT, the 480 does not have any throttling protection, and will heat up no matter what cooler you use.

For stress testing, i use 3D mark 11 and vantage, with some Unigene Heaven.