Legit Video Card Reviews
Zotac GeForce GTX 470 Video Card Review
| Manufacturer: | Zotac |
| Product: | GTX 470 |
| Date: | Fri, Jun 04, 2010 - 12:00 AM |
| Written By: | Chris Morrell - |
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Overclocking Results
This card is quite strange in that it would run all day long at 825/1000 but one bump higher on the core and memory threw all stability out the window. The following run was accomplished with much huffing, puffing, and cursing at the card to complete.
In order to get this run off I had to bump the vgpu to 1.045v, anything higher and the card would overheat with 100% fan halfway through GT2 and any less and it would error out during the end of GT1. NVIDIA really built a monstrosity and I can't imagine what the GTX 480 is like. After several failed runs trying to get 850MHz core to pass I decided to check the power consumption.
Fermi definitely brings the heat. Blowing past even the HD 5870 at stock and burning through 400w for the entire system at the overclocked settings is impressive. Keep in mind these power numbers include a 980x at 3.5GHz with EIST enabled, 6GB of ram, all the power dissipated in the Rampage III Extreme, a 7200rpm hard-drive, and powersupply inefficiencies. That all said the GTX 470 burns another 70w compared to the stock HD 5870 and when overclocked the GTX 470 is ahead by 120w. No shock that NVIDIA hasn't announced a dual-GPU card yet seeing how hot just one of these cores are.
Lastly, let's take a look at some 3DMark 2006 scaling with the GTX 470 and the 980X under a single-stage. For starters let's keep the CPU near the stock frequency with the GPU at a a stable overclock.
Not too shabby, but surely there must be more locked away in that monstrous GPU?
Now that is some interesting scaling. Keep in mind the CPU score jumped ~3300 points but the SM2 score also jumped ~4000 points and the SM3 score jumped ~2900 points. Clearly the ZOTAC GTX 470 is CPU limited in 3DMark 2006 around stock frequencies. Considering how the GTX 470 keeps scaling with some samples scaling past 850MHz on the stock cooler, there is a lot of untapped power in these cores. The biggest thing to take away from this page is that even the 980x can bottleneck this GPU.
Next Page - Conclusion
| Review Index |
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Page 1 - Zotac GeForce GTX 470
Page 2 - Box and Bundle Page 3 - Test Configuration Page 4 - Test Results Page 5 - Overclocking Results Page 6 - Conclusion |
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