14 DAY TRIAL // As NVIDIA has made the GeForce GTX 470 and GeForce GTX 480 cards official, after many months of waiting and repeated delays, its partners are, naturally, making haste in releasing their own versions. EVGA, one of the several NVIDIA-exclusive graphics adapter manufacturers, seems to be especially enthusiastic, having revealed no less than six different models based on the GF100 processor, of which three are GTX 470 models and three are GTX 480.
All cards fully support DirectX 11 graphics (obviously), as well as CUDA, PhysX, 3D Vision Surround and three-way SLI configurations. In addition, they draw their power through two PCI Express power connectors and also have dual DVI and mini HDMI outputs. Four of the models, a stock-clocked and SuperClocked version of both the 470 and 480, remain true to NVIDIA's reference design, but the GeForce GTX 480 Hydro Copper FTW and the GeForce GTX 470 Hydro Copper FTW, as their name implies, use water cooling to make sure their factory overclocked GPUs don't go up in flames.
"EVGA is here to deliver what the community demands: the next level DirectX 11 gaming and compute accelerator. The EVGA GTX 470 and 480 cards offer the fastest Tessellation and Ray Tracing performance on the planet, indeed these are very exciting times for our customers," said Bob Klase, VP of Sales at EVGA. "We are thrilled to be offering the best NVIDIA products and support in the industry."
The two water cooled graphics cards use the hydro Copper waterblock, developed in collaboration with Swiftech. Its base plate is made of chrome plated electrolytic C110 copper, high flow of 1/2" and 3/8" fittings and a 0.6x0.6mm thin pin matrix.
In addition to showcasing its Fermi offer, EVGA has also unwrapped a Fur-Mark inspired tool, known as the OC Scanner, which provides real-time monitoring and has built-in artifact scanning, log functionality and benchmark functionality. The software works on Windows XP, Vista and 7 and is already available, unlike the cards themselves, which will only start selling on April 12. In fact, only EVGA's GTX 470 and GTX 470 SC are currently up for pre-order.
The complete card lineup may be seen in detail here.
