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Stuntin
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« on: March 05, 2010, 11:06:35 AM » |
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Not as impressive as the GTX 480
by Lars-Göran Nilsson
March 4, 2010
IT DIDN'T TAKE long before pictures of the GTX470 card without a heatsink appeared, following the tantalizing pictures of the GTX480 that came out on Tuesday. However, what's even more interesting is that early benchmark figures have finally leaked and it's not looking good for Nvidia.
ComputerBase.de scored some pictures of a GTX470 in the nude, as well as a GTX480, and it makes it very easy to compare the two models. As we mentioned in the GTX480 piece on Tuesday, the card uses a 3, 4, 3 memory layout and the card is said to use a 320-bit memory interface, rather than the 384-bit interface used by the GTX480. The GTX470 has only a four phase power regulation design and this is located at the lower part of the PCB which is a very unusual design. Part of the reason for this appears to be the two big cut-outs for the fan to be able to draw in air through, which strangely enough are bigger than the similar cut-outs on the GTX480.
The memory gets to make do with single phase power regulation and as with the GTX480, there’s no NVIO chip in sight here either. The cooler as we already mentioned is quite different as well, as not only does it lack the heatpipes of the GTX480, but it’s also very obvious that the heatsink has a copper surface, something that isn’t clear on the GTX480 cooler. The mounts are also slightly different, but this makes sense as the PCB’s are so different.
The benchmark figures are from two different sources, respected German publication Heise.de and Chiphell’s forum. Heise.de states that the card scores somewhere between a Radeon HD5850 and an HD5870 in 3DMark Vantage in X-mode, tested on an unspecified system. The GTX470 scores 7,511 points, while the HD5870 bests it with 8,730 points, while the HD5850 falls short by about 1,000 points at 6,430. However, when you switch to the default settings things take a slightly different turn of events with the GTX470 scoring 17,156 points compared to 17,303 for the HD5870 and a low(!) 14,300 for the HD5850.
Chiphell on the other hand offers a 3DMark 06 result, but the system is using a Core 2 Duo E8190 processor that operates at a fairly slow 2.66GHz and the system had only 2GB of RAM. Here we see a result of a mere 13,264 points, with a Shader Model 2.0 score of 5,699 and HDR/Shader Model 3.0 score of 7,569. Taking into account the CPU score of 2,486, we’d say that the card was CPU limited in this specific test.
Heise.de also has some Unigine DirectX 11 results testing out the tessellation performance of the GTX470. The Nvidia card managed 29 fps compared to 22 fps for the HD5850 and 27 fps for the HD5870. Throw in 8x anti-aliasing and these scores drop to 20 fps, 19 fps and 23 fps respectively. The Shaders, or CUDA cores if you prefer, were supposedly running at 1,255MHz with the GDDR5 memory clocked at 1,600MHz or 3,200MHz effectively.
Interestingly Heise.de approached Nvidia and asked it how many Shaders/CUDA cores the GTX480 will ship with and Nvidia refused to comment. This suggests that the GTX480 might ship with less than 512 Shaders enabled, but the GTX470 has been confirmed to have 448 Shaders if you believe a screen shot that appeared on Chinese website yesky (post 7). The NDA for Fermi is set to expire on the 27th of March and Nvidia’s European PR “guy” (his words, not ours) Igor Stanek, has confirmed this on Twitter.
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