NVIDIA Defends GTX 480’s Heat & Power Consumption

A little over a week ago, NVIDIA finally took the veil off of its first GF100-based graphics cards, which came in the form of the GeForce GTX 470 and GTX 480. As we quickly found out, whether or not the cards were worth the wait depended on your point-of-view, but as it seemed, the majority of people (based on comments around the Web) were hoping for a little bit more.

If you read our review of the GTX 480, which I recommend if you haven’t already, both heat and power were major complaints of mine, and were a big reason that I wasn’t able to out-right recommend the card. The GTX 480 is in a rough spot, because while it does offer the best gaming performance on the market, the trade-off for most people just isn’t worth it. Do you higher power, higher temps, a louder fan, a higher price and lack of video outputs to go with that 5 – 10% performance gain? That’s pretty much what things boiled down to.

In the conclusion to our review, I mentioned that NVIDIA is living by a trade-off theory where the GTX 480 is concerned. In a recent blog post, Drew Henry, the company’s General Manager of GeForce, reiterated that. He stated, “When you build a high performance GPU like the GTX 480 it will consume a lot of power to enable the performance and features I listed above. It was a tradeoff for us, but we wanted it to be fast. The chip is designed to run at high temperature so there is no effect on quality or longevity. We think the tradeoff is right.“.

I mentioned later in my conclusion that I didn’t entirely agree with that theory, and I still don’t. Perhaps a part of it is that none of us should have been expecting huge performance gains, but rather a boost in features. We might have built ourselves up for a big let-down. Over the past couple of years, NVIDIA has really been pushing its special technologies more than the performance of its GPUs, so in that sense, GF100 shouldn’t have been all too surprising.

The problem is, though, that gamers who invest more money in a piece of equipment want to see results, not sit on the technology for a year before it’s truly taken advantage of. Could you imagine purchasing a Ferrari and being limited to using it on only a track?

To be fair to NVIDIA, at least it did release GF100 in any form. It might not be seriously attractive, but at least it’s here. I have a good feeling that if the company truly had the decision, it would have spent even more time on ironing out the issues most every reviewer brought up. Hopefully in the coming months the company will be able to further refine things and get the heat and power under control. Or at least start bundling coupons for discounts on your power bill and also ice machines.

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.