Don’t Miss Our GeForce GTX 480 Review!

In case it isn’t obvious enough at the top of our site, I wanted to draw your attention to our in-depth look at NVIDIA’s latest and greatest, which we posted yesterday. I think it’s safe to say that most people are going to be relieved that the first cards are finally here, but likewise, I’m sure there are going to be many who were hoping for a bit more as well.

As we discovered, the GTX 480 isn’t a bad card, per se, but given it has arrived six months after the HD 5870, it’s almost impossible to feel excited. The reasons are made evident in our review… high temps, high power draw, loud noise, limited video connectors – and that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

It’s all rather unfortunate, too, given the amount of hassle NVIDIA had to put up with just to get GF100 out the door. Though the high-end cards have issues, I am looking forward to some of NVIDIA’s more mainstream GF100 offerings that are to come, because that might help reinvigorate things just a bit. That is, as long as pricing is taken into consideration.

That’s the biggest problem with NVIDIA’s cards at the moment… they are higher priced than AMD’s, despite not offering much more in real value. Because of this, those who were waiting to see if ATI was going to lower prices are going to have to wait a bit long (no one knows when this will be). Either way, NVIDIA did well to finally get GF100 out the door, but it has a lot to do in order to right all of the wrongs.

We’ve learned a lot about NVIDIA’s GF100 (Fermi) architecture over the past year, and after what seemed like an eternal wait, the company has officially announced the first two cards as part of the series; the GeForce GTX 470 and GTX 480. To start, we’re taking a look at the latter, so read on to see if it GF100 was worth the wait.