NVIDIA unleashes GeForce GTX 480 and GTX 470 Fermi cards

I had previously posted about Nvidia’s plans of launching the Fermi Tesla based DirectX 11 cards and they were supposed to be named GTX 480 and GTX 470.Now officially Nvidia have released the monsters to combat their Graphics counterpart ATI which have the best card in the world namely 5970, besides they have also have the medium performance based ones like 5850 and 5870 and  passively cooled Radeon HD 5450 available for less than $50.NVIDIA was struggling to prepare its first DX11 part. The company previewed its Fermi architecture in October, but details have been few as the manufacturing problems and yield issues at the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company still plague NVIDIA’s 40nm process.

The first Graphics Fermi 100 (GF100) chips started production in January, but it wasn’t until February that we learned that they would be sold under the GeForce GTX 480 and GeForce GTX 470 monikers. Some specifications finally showed up last week but now the details are clear.Let me give more info on it.480 CUDA cores, 700 MHz graphics and 1,401MHz processor clock speeds, plus 1.5GB of onboard GDDR5 memory running at 1,848MHz (for a 3.7GHz effective data rate).Those are the specs upon which Fermi is built, and those are the numbers that will seek to justify a $499 price tag and a spectacular 250W TDP.GTX 470 on the other hand will come with a humbler 1.2GB of memory plus 607MHz, 1,215MHz and 1,674MHz clocks, while dinging your wallet for $349 and straining your case’s cooling with 215W of hotness.

The die size of the GF100 chip is massive, measuring 23mm x 23mm for a total of 529 square millimeters. By comparison, the Cypress chips used in the Radeon 5800 and 5900 series cards come in at a more moderate 334mm², making the GF100 almost 60% larger.The powerhouse chip consumes an extraordinary amount of power. NVIDIA recommends the use of a 600W power supply with the GTX 480, but that is just a minimum. Enthusiasts who want to prepare for a possible SLI setup should have a 1000W PSU at the minimum, with a 1200W PSU not out of the question.NVIDIA’s first DirectX 11 parts are betting big on tessellation becoming the way games are rendered in the future, with the entire architecture being geared toward taking duties off the CPU and freeing up its cycles to deliver performance improvements elsewhere. The tessellation engine in particular is exceptional strong, and the near-linear scaling bodes well for those enthusiasts considering a GF100 SLI setup.

Check out the performance chart above for a comparison GTX 480 , GTX 470 , HD 5850 and HD 5870.

Somewhat surprising is the lack of support for DisplayPort, the next-generation computer display standard set to replace VGA and DVI for desktops and laptops. NVIDIA states that the GF100 supports DisplayPort, but it will be up to its board partners to support it in their own designs.Instead, the reference design has two Dual-link DVI ports and an almost useless mini-HDMI port. NVIDIA is keen to tout its three interfaces and support for its 3D Vision Surround technology, but users who wish to use more than two monitors at the same time will be required to use a second card. This contrasts strongly with ATI’s Eyefinity technology present on all 5000 series cards, which support the use of three monitors at the same time using a single video card.

The most saddest part is readers should not expect volume availability until the week of April 12. There are supposed to be “tens of thousands” of GF100 cards at launch, but production is slow since all of the cards that will be sold during the launch are reference boards built by NVIDIA.Check out more pictures from Engadget gallery.Nvidia really needs to improve the power consumption and heat part else ATI’s 6 series is going to blow them.This seems like a power hungry monster but could get your power costs on a roll. I’ ll post once i get more info.

Read what others have to say about Nvidia cards.

AnandTech: “Fermi’s compute-heavy and tessellation-heavy design continues to interest us but home users won’t find an advantage to that design today.”

HardOCP: “The only thing that “blew us away” was the heat coming out of the video card and the sound of the fan.”

PC Perspective: “If you want the fastest single-GPU graphics card then the GTX 480 is the best there is.”

HotHardware: “Versus the single-GPU powered Radeon HD 5870, the GeForce GTX 480 is on average roughly 5% – 10% faster.”

Hexus: “A lot of juice means a lot of heat and load on the coolers. This is why the GeForce GTX 480′s excellent heatsink has to work overtime in keeping the GPU under 100°C.”

Legit Reviews: “The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 480 was known to be hot and fast before it came out and that is exactly what it turned out as being.”