NVIDIA GeForce GTX 480: GF100 Has Landed

Here it is folks; the moment many of you have been waiting for. The official unveiling of NVIDIA's next-gen flagship GPU, the GeForce GTX 480. The card you see pictured below is based on NVIDIA's own reference design, but expect all of their partner boards to look identical, save for some custom decals for the foreseeable future...

   

   

   
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 480 Reference Card

Somewhat surprisingly, the GeForce GTX 480 doesn't look much different than current GeForce GTX 200 series cards, due to the shells surrounding the units. Although a large portion of the GTX 480's heatsink is exposed, as are it's heatpipes, which we think looks really cool. The reference card picutred here has a GPU clock of 700MHz, with a Stream Processor clock of 1401MHz. 480 of 512 stream processor / CUDA cores in the GF100 GPU are enabled on the GTX 480, and the card sports a 1.536GB frame buffer consisting of GDDR5 memory clocked at 924MHz, for an effective data rate of 3.696GHz. The memory is connected via a 384-bit memory interface and the GPU has 60 texture units and 48 ROPs. This configuration offers a peak texture fillrate of a 42GTexels/s and over 177GB/s of memory bandwidth.

There are two dual-link DVI outputs on the card, along with a mini HDMI output with audio. The GeForce GTX 280 required both a 6-pin and an 8-pin PCI Express power connector and max board power hovers around 250 watts. More information about the GF100 GPU itself and the card's acoustic and thermal characteristics are available in the pages ahead. We thought since this card has been so hotly anticipated, that we would let you all get up close and personal from the get go.

The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 470 Reference Card

Also coming down the pipeline is the GeForce GTX 470. In terms of features and capabilities, the GTX 470 and 480 are identical. The GTX 470, however, has fewer stream processors / CUDA cores enabled, 448 to be exact, it has a smaller memory interface and its clock speeds are a bit lower. The GeForce GTX 470 has a 320-bit memory interface with 1.28GB of frame buffer memory running at 837MHz (3.348GHz effective). Its GPU is clocked at 607MHz and has 56 texture units and 40 ROPs available. We do not have a GeForce GTX 470 in hand just yet, however, so we won't be showcasing its performance here.  We'll just have to save that for another article.