PNY GeForce GTX 470 Review

In terms of features and capabilities, the GeForce GTX 470 and more powerful, flagship GeForce GTX 480 are identical. The GTX 470, however, has fewer stream processors / CUDA cores enabled, 448 to be exact versus 480 in its higher-end counterpart. The GeForce GTX 470 also  has a smaller memory interface and its clock speeds are a bit lower. More specifically, the GeForce GTX 470 has a 320-bit wide 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. 

      


      
The PNY GeForce GTX 470

With the sole exception being its custom "XLR8" decal, the PNY GeForce GTX 470 looks just like NVIDIA's reference GeForce GTX 470, or just about every other GeForce GTX 470 currently available for that matter. The card's GPU and memory reside on the front of the PCB and are cooled by a large heatsink and fan assembly that covers the whole front side of the card. On the back, there are notches cut into the PCB to allow more air to flow into the cooler's barrel-type fan, where the air is ten forced over the heatsink and expelled from the system through vents in the card's mounting bracket. Unlike the GTX 480, which has a large metal portion of its heatsink exposed, the GeForce GTX 470's heatsink is completely covered by a shroud. Also unlike the GTX 480, we found the GTX 470's cooler to operate at much more tolerable noise levels, even after many hours of testing.  With the GPU takes an running at a 90'C, the fan on this card doesn't spin any higher than 40% of its maximum speed.

As for the GeForce GTX 470's output configuration, there are two dual-link DVI outputs on the card, along with a mini HDMI output with audio. The GeForce GTX 470 required two 6-pin PCI Express power connectors and max board power hovers around 215 watts, about 35 watts less than the GeForce GTX 480. More information about the GF100 GPU itself is available here and we'll give some more detail on the card's power consumption characteristics on a later page.

Since we're talking specifically about PNY's GeForce GTX 470 offering, we should also talk a bit about its accessory bundle. PNY includes a users manual and installation guide with their GeForce GTX 470, along with the obligatory driver CD, a VGA-to-DVI adapter, a dual-Molex-to-PCI Express 6-Pin adapter, and a mini-HDMI to full-sized HDMI adapter. We should also note, however, that a promotion is currently running that will net buyers of this, and most other GeForce GTX 400 series cards, a coupon good for the full version of Just Cause 2, which is a pretty cool game we'll be incorporating into our test routing moving forward.