NVIDIA Lists Chassis Recommendations for GTX 480 Use

“What? MORE whining about GTX 480 issues?!” … Hey now, cut me some slack. I just post what’s relevant! Sure, since I’ve posted our in-depth look at NVIDIA’s GeForce GTX 480, I feel like I’ve beaten the dead horse far too many times since. Yes, the GTX 480 has some issues, and yes, it makes the purchasing decision more difficult. I received a call from NVIDIA earlier, though, that piqued my curiosity a little bit.

NVIDIA’s trusty Technical Marketing Director, Nick Stam, mentioned that a couple of the more severe issues I experienced during all of the testing could be helped with the right hardware, namely the chassis. As always, we list our full system specs in any performance-related content we publish, and in the “case” of GPU reviews, we’ve been using SilverStone’s TJ10 for quite some time.

Admittedly, it’s not the best case out there for dampening sound, but to its credit, that’s not a feature it touts. Because of this less-than-ideal chassis, though, the noise I heard could be more pronounced than what you’ll hear. I stand by the fact that the GTX 480 is the loudest card I’ve heard in a while, but if you are ready to jump on the GTX 480 train, there could be some easy solutions…

… as long as you don’t mind purchasing a new chassis. Nick gave me a quick list of current chassis that are selling quite well on the market, and mentions that NVIDIA is in the process of validating more for GTX 480 (SLI and non) use. These include:

• Cooler Master CM 690
• Cooler Master HAF 932
• Cooler Master Stacker
• Thermaltake Element V
• SilverStone Raven RV02

Some of these selections aren’t too surprising, as we’ve taken a look at most of them in the past and found the silence to be quite true. So it can be assumed that if you use one of these chassis, then the noise level from the card won’t be quite as bad. But what about heat? The same list of chassis apply, because they’re optimized for both quiet operation and also effective airflow. In the near-future, I’d like to get one of these chassis in and test the GTX 480 in it to see if I notice a decrease in sound and temperatures, compared to the TJ10’s we currently use.

Nick also commented on another one of my complaints, which was the lack of video outputs on the back of the card. He stresses that vendors, such as EVGA, ASUS, Gigabyte, and so forth, are more than able to include a differing mix of video outputs should they choose. All of the cards on the market currently are NVIDIA’s own design, so until we start to see non-reference models hit the market, we’re still a bit locked into what’s available.

Although somewhat unrelated, I had an interesting experience the other day. A friend gave me a call, and despite me offering all my opinions in my article, he asked me for further opinions on the GTX 480 since he was thinking of purchasing one. He’s still not made up his mind, but he’s fairly certain he’s going to take the NVIDIA route, for the simple reason that he enjoys both PhysX and 3D Vision quite a bit (he mentioned that 3D Vision happens to look REALLY good with Metro 2033, but naturally, the performance is horrible on most cards!). This boils down to something else I said in the article, though. The GTX 480 might not be the most ideal card out there, but if PhysX and 3D Vision are important to you, you’re choices are limited (luckily for NVIDIA).

As a side note, Nick also linked me here, where you can find the perfect PSU, whether or not you want one, two, or three GTX 480’s.

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.