Jump to content

Nvidia Fermi - GTX 480/470 Launch Day!

flyinghaggis

By flyinghaggis
in General Chat

 Share

Recommended Posts

flyinghaggis

flyinghaggis

Posted
Posted

With the launch of Nvidia's long-awaited/ badly delayed Fermi cards literally just hours away I thought I'd fuel the pre-release hype a bit and start a thread about it. Some of the features sound quite tasty!

 

Nvidia 3D Surround Vision

NVIDIA 3D Vision Surround eyes-on, triple the fun -- Engadget

 

According to benckmarks the top tier GTX480 is set to become the fastest singe GPU card on the market when it's released. The NDA's lifted tomorrow so likely all the usual hardware sites will have reviews/articles on it then.

 

Personally I'm probably gonna get myself a GTX470 assuming it matches the alledged performance/specs/price.

 

Anyone else planning on grabbing one on the above cards when they're released? :cool:

  • Thanks 1
synaesthesia

synaesthesia

Posted
Posted

Mugs cards. These are likely to almost bust nVidia, for falling down the same road as 3Dfx did. Underpowered, overhungry and badly designed. Compared to the ATI 5870 they really are dreadful pieces of hardware. What sort of moron designs a card that munches 300w of juice on it's own, has a die size nearly TWICE that of ATI's chip chucking out a hell of a lot more heat - the cooling system on them is a joke.

 

Sorry, but they are an absolutely laughable bit of hardware that will be avoided by all but fanboys and mugs. The release boards won't even be the spec they're supposed to be because they can't make them reliable enough and chuck out too much heat. The 10% performance increase over the 5870 will be absolutely worthless when you're baking the inside of your case slowly.

 

It stinks of the Voodoo 5/6 series - remember those? :)

flyinghaggis

flyinghaggis

Posted
  • Author
Posted (edited)

LOL, well they're certianly dividing opinion. That's for sure! Most of the pre-release articles have painted a fairly negative picture (overpriced,power-hungry,underpowered,). Having said that most sources seem to suggest that it's going to be on par in terms of performance/pricing to the ATI 5800 series.

 

I still have faith that Nvidia might just yet pull something pretty special out of the bag though. We'll find out soon enough at any rate!

 

...the cooling system on them is a joke....

 

I thought the cooling system on them looked pretty awesome to be honest :D

 

http://media.bestofmicro.com/V/O/242196/original/14607_13.jpg

 

http://media.bestofmicro.com/V/N/242195/original/14607_12.jpg

Edited by flyinghaggis
synaesthesia

synaesthesia

Posted
Posted

Performance wise they're slightly ahead of the 5870's - the point is when they're going to raise your electricity bills and probably make you need a stupidly high powered PSU the cost side of it is ridiculous. The tables really have turned in the last year or so, with nVidia lazily renaming it's old models instead of innovating anything, and then this, when ATI in comparison have released the 5xxx series Radeons with power consumption numbers you'd expect from mid-range cards from 2006, reasonably priced, high powered and just does the job.

Even more of a gap when you consider drivers - theories are abound that ATI and nVidia swapped their code-monkies around, where nV are struggling with poor drivers (even those that physically murder your hardware! :D ) and still can't manage to handle multiple monitors properly without the use of 3rd party software.

 

I've long been an nVidia guy, going from the days of the old STB Riva 128's and TNT2 Ultras up to the 8800GT and very happy with nearly all of them. I'm more than aware of the fact that without nVidia, AMD/ATI would have gone bust/been bought out long ago. However, with their recent attempts at "innovation" they're falling down the same road that bust 3Dfx and forced them into a buyout by NV.

 

Really, really need to be a fool to buy into Fermi.

flyinghaggis

flyinghaggis

Posted
  • Author
Posted

Yeah, my friend had one of those in an Alienware PC he bought when they were first released. Certianly lived up to it's nick-name the 'Dust-Buster' :)

 

Mind you IIRC Nvidia was outclassed by ATI's equivalent card (Radeon 9700) at the time, which was regarded as one of the best it's ever released, and struggled to match it which was the reason the FX5800 was so half-baked.

 

That was back in 2002/2003. Is history going to repeat itself.....

mac_shinobi

mac_shinobi

Posted
Posted
Yeah, my friend had one of those in an Alienware PC he bought when they were first released. Certianly lived up to it's nick-name the 'Dust-Buster' :)

 

Mind you IIRC Nvidia was outclassed by ATI's equivalent card (Radeon 9700) at the time, which was regarded as one of the best it's ever released, and struggled to match it which was the reason the FX5800 was so half-baked.

 

That was back in 2002/2003. Is history going to repeat itself.....

 

Could be wrong here but I remember having the FX5900, if history is going to repeat itself and its going to be a waste of money etc getting the new fermi I may be converted to going with ATI

CraigM

CraigM

Posted
Posted

I am a Nvidia man, always have been. I really like their drivers as well, it is simple and straightforward. ATI's drivers have never appealed to me.

 

I think Fermi is going to take the perfomance crown, and it will do great things in GPU computing as well, but the power envelope is a bit worrying. I'm not sure how much longer these companies can keep making such power hungry beasts.

  • Thanks 1
synaesthesia

synaesthesia

Posted
Posted

Performance is staggering - 480 gives 7FPS more than the 5870 in Farcry - which is nVidia territory!

Average difference in games is 2-5fps looking at figures from the likes of TPU so far.

 

300watts for 7fps... no thanks.

mac_shinobi

mac_shinobi

Posted
Posted
Performance is staggering - 480 gives 7FPS more than the 5870 in Farcry - which is nVidia territory!

Average difference in games is 2-5fps looking at figures from the likes of TPU so far.

 

300watts for 7fps... no thanks.

 

in that case looks like if they can bring the 5870 to the mac pro - I will be getting an ATI, 7fps is not worth the amount of cash they are asking for the 480GTX and thats forgetting about / ignoring the 300 watt psu for the gfx card.

 

They are having a complete laugh

flyinghaggis

flyinghaggis

Posted
  • Author
Posted (edited)

Initial (unconfirmed) reports seem to state that the tdp's of the cards are:-

 

GTX480 - ~250w

GTX470 - ~225w

 

Slightly higher than the equivalent ATI cards :-

 

Radeon 5870 - 190w

Radeon 5850 - 170w

 

Around 50w per card higher when running at full tilt. Be interesting to see whether how they compare when sitting at the standard windows desktop idling and not in game.

Edited by flyinghaggis
synaesthesia

synaesthesia

Posted
Posted
Do they do any modern ATI cards in the macs? I know they certainly used to do a shedload of the apple kit but these days it's pretty much all nvidia. AMD should certainly look into it, but with macs being mostly intel based, it might not be in their interest. Shame though - that's a good market they should get into.
ZeroHour

ZeroHour

Posted
Posted (edited)
Performance is staggering - 480 gives 7FPS more than the 5870 in Farcry - which is nVidia territory!

Average difference in games is 2-5fps looking at figures from the likes of TPU so far.

 

300watts for 7fps... no thanks.

 

LOL always remember to give sources.

 

Its a little better then 7fps!

1st Fermi review - Overclockers UK Forums

People are already crying about physx being on but if the game supports it I think it should be on as its a FEATURE. If it was an ATI only feature they wouldnt be crying.

More reviews will come but that looks good initially and since NO ONE KNOWS THE PRICE we cant comment.

 

http://img338.imageshack.us/img338/4261/metro1.jpg

 

*DISCLAIMER, it assumes they are not fake obviously

Edited by ZeroHour
Arthur

Arthur

Posted
Posted

It's going to be hard to beat the Radeon idle power consumption figures.

 

Radeon HD 5970 = 143 watts

Radeon HD 5870 = 117 watts

Radeon HD 5850 = 118 watts

Radeon HD 4890 = 165 watts

GeForce GTX 295 = 167 watts

GeForce GTX 285 = 130 watts

GeForce GTX 260 = 127 watts

 

Numbers from The Tech Report.

DMcCoy

DMcCoy

Posted
Posted (edited)
It's going to be hard to beat the Radeon idle power consumption figures.

 

Power consumption

We measured total system power consumption at the wall socket

 

Edit: Don't want to compare two sorts of power, card tdp vs total system idle.

 

I think the 5870 idles around 25w or so, so yes it will be tough to beat :D

Edited by DMcCoy
synaesthesia

synaesthesia

Posted
Posted

Excuse the poor analogy buy why spend £100,000 on an Aston Martin when you can spend £10,000 on a Mondeo RS that won't cost you an arm and a leg to run. People might secretly slobber over them but in reality it'll be easier to squeeze more performance out of said mondeo and have plenty of cash left over for the macdonalds drive-through afterwards.

 

I'll firmly stand by my comments that the Fermi is an absolutely worthless concoction of crap, which'll be bought only by the fanboys or poor souls that believe anything PC World will tell them.

synaesthesia

synaesthesia

Posted
Posted (edited)

Some more interesting figures :D

 

ForumBase - Einzelnen Beitrag anzeigen - ATi HD5800 und nVidia GTX400 (DX11 Gerüchteküche)

 

475 watts under load.... to quote Cleveland - that's naaaasty. (yes, that will be the full system load but that's terrible by all accounts)

 

Those come from the pulled Hexus.net reviews.

 

93ºC GPU temperature?

 

Time to get the frying pans out... :D

Edited by synaesthesia
flyinghaggis

flyinghaggis

Posted
  • Author
Posted (edited)

Well the reviews are out. Article and links to most reviews at the bottom of the page :-

 

NVIDIA unleashes GeForce GTX 480 and GTX 470 'tessellation monsters' -- Engadget

 

In a nutshell :-

 

In it's favour

---------------

The GTX480 is marginally faster than the RADEON 5870

GTX470 is roughly on par with RADEON 5850

SLI scaling now appears to work really well and is up to 90% efficient in some games (so very nearly double the frame rate)

Has the potential to be quite a lot faster in some games using tesselation/physX

CUDA processing performance looks like it could be awesome for video encoding/etc

 

Against

---------

Needs roughly ~50 watts more than the equivalent ATI cards

No triple monitor support without an SLI configuration

Priced at ~£100 more than the 'equivalent' Radeon 5800.

(GTX470 ~£325 vs RADEON 5850 = £225

GTX480 ~£450 vs RADEON 5870 = £325)

 

 

So there you have it! I guess the general feeling is one of mild disapppointment as they've not really pulled anything special out of the bag. Once you factor in the pricing it's got fail written over it as card-for-card NVIDIA are roughly £100 more. They're genally faster than ATI at the top end in terms of benchmarks but pretty much on a par which isn't a good thing when you launch 6 months later.

 

From a personal point of view it's pretty much put me off as the card I was planning on buying (GTX470) now has an 'on-the-street' price of around £325 which is about £100 more than I expected it to be! That factored with the lack of triple monitor support without an SLI configuration is a bit of a show stopper at the moment aswell. Unless I win the lottery and buy 2 x GTX480s in SLI in which case it'll work out just fine!

 

 

On a positive note I'm currenly playing the Starcraft2 beta (which is running OK on my Geforce 8800GT incidentally!) :)

Edited by flyinghaggis

Create an account or sign in to comment

You need to be a member in order to leave a comment

Create an account

Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!

Register a new account

Sign in

Already have an account? Sign in here.

Sign In Now
 Share
Go to topic listing


×
×
  • Create New...