14 DAY TRIAL // It seems that moving on to a newer top-grade NVIDIA card is not Gigabyte's choice right now, the company having decided to push a certain board one last time, this time equipped with a superior cooling device.
No doubt enthusiasts are already eagerly playing with, or dreaming about, the newest top-end card from NVIDIA, the GTX 580.
The board came out some time ago and will soon completely replace the GTX 480, its predecessor, as it is more powerful, cooler and less power hungry.
It uses the GF110 GPU and is clearly in the lead, performance-wise, according to benchmarks, both compared to tis siblings as well as AMD's own lineup.
Still, not all of NVIDIA's partners are ready to give up on the GTX 480, one of them being Gigabyte, whose labs have just delivered a custom-cooled version of it.
Granted, the newcomer does not have any sort of performance enhancements, but it does promise to run cooler than the stock model.
As it has become well known, the card is centered around the GF100 graphics processing unit, a Fermi chip built on the 40nm process technology.
It is dubbed GV-N480UD-15I revision 2.0 and boasts 480 CUDA cores, 1,536 MB of GDDR5 VRAM and support for not just DirectX 11, but also 3-way SLI, an HDMI output and dual-DVI.
Furthermore, the GPU operates at a clock speed of 700 MHz, whereas the shaders and memory are clocked at 1,401 MHz and 3,696 MHz, respectively.
Finally, the WindForce 3X cooler itself covers the entire 'front' side of card and includes three fans.
Those wishing to get a first-hand view of all available information on the Gigabyte GeForce GTX 480 WindForce 3X need only drop by the official product page, located here.
Unfortunately, there has, so far, been no word of any sort on what kind of price one can expect to have to pay for this newcomer.