GF100 evaluation thread

The chance of AMD coming with a faster part in the near future is there. I don't think NV would like to see AMD release a refresh before the GTX480 actually sells and they'll have to play second fiddle for another six months.

 

Maybe an admin can post the voters

 

Whats a RV840? All I know are Hemlock, Cypress, Juniper, Redwood but I see no RV840. If you were in Daves shoes you would have just had to put a few dollars into the swearword jar.

 

Juniper
840
840
840
840 because numbers are inherently easier.

I see the 840 as a retargeting of RV770 towards consumer-mainstream and mobiles, but ATI seems to be having some troubles with the mobility parts and/or speccing proper cooling for them. Oh well- considering the perf/W on Ferdy now, I'm having even more concerns for the mobility part. Will power usage go up by 20W when you connect a second display?

 

And me. It seems the most popular criticism is power consumption - important but not at the top of my list. If you were waiting on it to beat up on Cypress it's definitely a meh. If like me you were waiting for a proper DX11 card from Nvidia that could beat up on GT200 you got what you wanted.

 

I was thinking Lonbjerg, since I know him most as Atech from [H].

Voted meh to both, but thats because I was hoping for more after all the fuzz. So far, its nothing to be exited about for me at least. I agree on your thoughts though. It seems that the biggest criticism in all the reviews is power consumption (and problems like heat/noise related to that). If they would have been released at the same time as Cypress, I would be more excited about the new cards.

I love that the cards performs that well on tessellation, since its one feature I would like to see more in games. If they keep up and develope that feature more in the next gen cards, it would be a big purchase point for me if there will be games where I can benefit for some "extreme settings of tessellation" as seen in Heaven benchmark.

 

If they'd kept the power consumption in check (which would have kept the noise and heat down), the performance would have been significantly lower. Nvidia would have had to sell the product for less, whilst having a larger chip and worse yields.

At least this way Nvidia can claim some small performance leadership to keep prices up. It would have been much worse had they been slower on top of being late.

 

If they would've released it back in September'09, can you imagine how much more of "teh sucks" would be attributed to it only being "Beta" drivers.

I'm not sure I've heard that argument much last year, but now it seems that a new architecture which has had driver development almost as long as Evergreen is suddenly excused.

I'm pretty sure that the release drivers will have adjusted fan/power profiles so the cards will behave quite differently in consumer hands.

 

I don't think that these cards are excused that much. With all the delays, mockup cards with wooden screws and "wait for it" remarks, I think people are underwhelmed with these cards now 6 months after Cypress release. Too little, too late. If released in September, people would have been more patient with drivers I think and would have excused them much more.

 

Only 7 people would have gotten one anyway.

Someone at Hardocp mentioned that a French reviewer had a GTX 480 in a Sonata III case and it went all the way to 110C at load. Isn't that supposedly a well ventilated case? Wonder how much worst it would be in a lesser case.

 

I think, this all sums it up (and how most people got fooled by nVidia's claim of 250W to PR peeps.

I've had quite some PM's with Ailuros and right up to the launch he called my 295W measured power draw was Bullshit. I guess this whole launch drama will put a dent in a lot of people's faith.

 

I wonder how reliability will hold up? I remember a survey showing some fairly high failure rates (IMO) for some of the GTX 285s especially. If the card is now hotter and more complex and comes with some supposed Via issues, how long will a GTX 480 last and how often will it fail?

 

The 480 would need to be barely on par with the 5850 with AA enabled and have no advantages in DX11. That's where the 2900 XT ended up next to the 8800GTS-640 IIRC.

Yep, power consumption, heat and noise all go hand in hand. Like BZB pointed out it was critical that they hit some sort of performance lead - be it 10% or 20%, not sure where the averages fall right now. That eliminates the biggest pitfall for them. Next up was pricing and so far that seems to be in line (well MSRP at least).

Gotta wait for reports from the front-line for sure. I have a feeling overclocking won't be fun, especially in warmer climates

 

I don't know. I've checked some pre-order sites and some in Germany and The Netherlands (Komplett) now state May 7th for a launch and 36 month warranty.

 

Could be bumpgate 2.0.

Now I'm wonder how much faster Cypress would have been had ATI disregarded power, heat, and sanity at the 5870 release.

 

It's a fairly good case, but it is also designed to be quiet. It's got front vents, but also a door. It's got no side vents, no top fans. It has front fans and rear fans, and mounts the PSU on top. It's a decent standard case, but it simply doesn't have what's required to cool something like the 480.

I really think people are going to need better cases. PSUs on the bottom, fans/vents on the top, front, back, side, mesh fronts for airflow, etc. Normal cases just will not be able to manage the heat and airflow required for something that runs as hot as 480.

If you look on the Antec website and compare their Sonata range with their gaming cases, you can see that even their cheapest gaming cases have a lot of the basic design features you will need to get enough air to Fermi. A Three Hundred case is going to do a lot better than a Sonata.

 

Doesn't the 5870 have software voltage control? I thought I saw reviews overclocking up to 1000Mhz. Maybe they did power consumption tests too.

 

Can you give us a hint as to where the missing 32 CUDA cores are?

 

Asus BIOS allow software to increase voltage to get high OC.

 

I wouldn't exactly call these drivers launch quality when they had some working silicon for a good while, just not available for sale. I am eager to see if they can extract that much more juice from them later on. I am more confident that they will have a proper chip exploiting Fermi to its potential. Had it run at target clocks and SPs that it would have swiped the floor.
By the way, is it me or Guru 3D langage is targetted at nvidiots? i.e

talking about a 3fps lead in Hawk 2560x1600..