nVIDIA GeForce GTX 470 Pro Reviews

Asus' GeForce GTX 470–based ENGTX470 offers the same kind of impressive gaming performance you get with ATI's Radeon HD 5870 card, but at a lower price and with the bonus of CUDA GPU–accelerated computing support.

NVIDIA does bring several things to the table with their video card. This card supports Triple SLI but keep aware of the power requirements of 250W for a single card maximum on a machine. PhysX is a great feature for games as you can see the visual difference in performance with it on and the effects can be amazing., 3D Vision Surround are also features that the competition does not have, NVIDIA has finally released a competitive part to match ATI but the question is will they release a competitive part to the rest of ATI’s lineup in a short fashion as the mainstream and value segments are where the majority of video card sales made. We will have to wait and see. NVIDIA has finally stepped up to the plate and in doing so we give the GTX480 a Hot Product Award for the folks and friends of NVIDIA.

If you can stand the power requirements of these cards, both the GeForce GTX 480 and GTX 470 turned out to be surprisingly good enthusiast options. If you want the fastest single-GPU graphics card then the GTX 480 is the best there is and if you want a reasonably priced enthusiast solution then the GTX 470 is a worthy pick as well.

NVIDIA has created performance competitive and price competitive graphics cards that fall slightly behind in terms of noise and power consumption / power efficiency. Some readers will find the power/heat/noise issues a real draw back but I think that most enthusiasts and consumers worried about gaming performance are much more interested in value for your dollar than anything else. Our SLI testing with the GTX 480 and GTX 470 proved that NVIDIA has spent some time with the hardware and driver to tweak for incredible multi-GPU scaling.

There's still merit in the GeForce GTX 470. PhysX is something the competition doesn't have; SLI scaling looks mighty impressive, and 3D Vision Surround promises to be cool and make use of the GPU's grunt. We also reckon that it will appear better over time as the expansive feature-set is tapped into by games developers becoming more familiar with the workings of the architecture.

In closing, we are not that impressed with the new GeForce GTX 470. We must say that we don't think the GeForce GTX 470 is priced competitively enough to give the two ATI Radeon 5800 series cards a run for their money. Perhaps those gunning for something in-between might find the GeForce GTX 470 a reasonable candidate, but it has its caveats as mentioned. Also with more DirectX 11 game titles later, the card might prove its worth.

While we’re sure the company wishes it was shipping 512-shader cards instead of pared-down boards, it’s hitting high-enough clocks to make GeForce GTX 480 and GeForce GTX 470 generally-faster than Radeon HD 5870 and Radeon HD 5850. This is especially true when you turn on anti-aliasing, as the new GeForce cards take a much smaller hit than their competition.

It's very hard to give the card a rating and for that reason I'm not going to at the moment. Performance is a mixed bag...

With an SRP of $349 backed up by some great performance increases over the HD 5850, we believe the GTX 470 has set itself up to be the new price / performance leader in the current market. Yes, there are a few wrinkles in the fabric of perfection (power consumption and heat) and ATI may still cut their prices but it is a relief to finally see some competition in this price bracket in particular. We’re actually more excited about the GTX 470 than the GTX 480 simply because NVIDIA did something not many thought they could achieve: beat ATI in the all-important performance per dollar category.

While performance is good and minimum framerates are awe-inspiring, our main concerns about a GTX 470 SLI lie in two areas: price and power consumption.

The Fermi architecture packs in oodles of features and certainly has the potential to push forward gaming and non-gaming application performance. However, in the cold light of day, the architecture is all theoretical and so far the final product just doesn't deliver. The GTX 470 is simply over-priced and under-performing.