NVIDIA GeForce GTX470 > Reviews (1)

This is my review of the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 470. When the Fermi series of graphics cards first launched, i was very worried with the amount of heat these put out and of course the massive power draw, compared to the competition (ATI/AMD). Furthermore, the GTX 470 was priced very poorly here (in the UK), retailing at over £300 at launch, which was about the same as a Radeon HD 5870 which was a much better card in terms of performance and efficiency. Since then NVIDIA have been smart in reducing prices, and presently this card etails for as little as £209, which seems to be a splendid price.

When i purchased mine, about 2 months back it was still retailing for an average price of £270, i paid £260 for mine. However, the very next day the price dropped to £240 and i was pretty upset, as i could have saved myself £30 had i waited an extra day but alas i didn't know there would be a price drop as it was not announced. Since then prices have fell even more, making the opton to go SLI (adding a second card) even more tempting. Below is my opinion on what i have experianced with this product and what i feel could be the pros and cons.

*PERFORMANCE*
The performance of this graphics card is amazing. For the price of a HD 5850 (at the time of writing), you get performance which is between a the HD 5850 and the more powerful HD 5870, and through overclocking you can reach the performance of even a GTX 480, which is over £130 more than the GTX 470. There are some games where performance is less than amazing, of course this is common and could be said for ATI as well.

*PRICE*
When i purchased mine price was pretty high, however i took a shot as i wanted to try the green team and had enough money, sadly the price dropped £30 the next day and i was a bit gutted, and did consider returning the card and purchasing it again to save myself the £30 but didn't bother as i thought it was a hassel, and with shipping costs involved i would only save myself £15 so it was not worth it. However, now (september 2010), the prices of this card are simply amazing, and this in most cases outperforms the Radeon HD 5850 and comes close to it's bigger brother, the HD 5870 while even beating that in a few NVIDIA-favoring games. You also get other extras such as CUDA and Physx support which the ATI cards don't have but this would only be important if you use lots of CUDA-enabled applications or enjoy Physx (i personally don't care here).

*OVERCLOCKING*
Obviously most computer hardware enthusiasts who purchase high-end products such as this would like to overclock it too, as did i. The overclockability of a card varies from one to another, and no one card is the same, especially with the NVIDIA Fermi series as they all have varying VIDs (Voltage Identification Digital), which determines the voltage required by the card to run with stability. Average overclocks for the GTX 470 cards on air (usually stock cooler) are about 750Mhz, however my perticular card can do 875Mhz on the core, up from 607Mhz stock, which is roughly 44% faster, which is nothing short of amazing.

You have to keep in mind here that the core=shader ratio is linked, so the shader clocks are double of what the core is, so at stock the core is 607Mhz and the shader clocks are 1215Mhz. The memory is also pretty good, and i can run 950Mhz stable (3800Mhz QDR), which is up from the stock 850Mhz, however memory overclocks don't yield much performance with the GTX 470 like they would with the Radeon HD 5850 due to the fact that the Fermi architecture has a lot more L1 and L2 cache, which results in fasther information being processed to and by the core, meaning that memory bandwidth wouldn't play a huge role if it was at an acceptable speed. Please also note here that my GTX 470 can easily surpass and beat a stock clocked GTX 480, which is over £120 more in cost. The GTX 470 is a very good product when it comes to performance-price ratio.

*EFFICIENCY*
This is one of the GTX 470s shortfalls, as with the Fermi architecture in general. The reason is quite obviously because it (Fermi) produces too much heat, due to the massive power consumption. As opposed to a Radeon HD 5850 with a MAX board power of 151W (w=watts), the GTX 470 is advertised to only consume a maximum of 215W, however it actully uses as much as 230W, and even more when overclocked, with additional voltage.

The second issue here is the massive heat output. Unlike my HD 5850 which i owned where i could game for a number of hours and not really notice any drastic rise in temperature, with the GTX 470, after about 5-10 minutes, my room gets very hot, and i should point out i have a window right next to my desk so it is ventilated well, while on auto settings, temperature can reach around 90*c before the fan really kicks in, and to keep temps below 80*c you would have to have the fan at relatively high speeds, around 70% which is louder than the Radeons, while i personally don't mind this as the sound can easily be overpowered by music or something else and if you are using a headset you wouldn't notice much, some people just may not like it so if you're looking for a low-noise card either get one which is non-reference cooling design.

*CONCLUSION*
All in all, if i had to rate this product out of 10, i would give it 8. It loses 1 mark for the very high power usage, although you are commiting to such things when you're looking at high-end performance parts, and it also loses 1 mark for the heat, which should really be lower considering this is built on a 40nm process. In other notes, i was disappointed for the price i paid however i would blame myself considering i could have waited another day, however the certain product i have is such a good overclocker that i'm glad i didn't wait another day or i could've gotten another one, or that i didn't return it. In the end, this is a brilliant product and i would throughly recommend it. Somewhat of a lengthy review but i hope this helps any potential buyer who is interested in this product.