14 DAY TRIAL // Now that NVIDIA has finally made the official introduction of its GeForce GTX 400 Series graphics adapters, its partners are naturally following suite with their customized models. MSI, of course, is one of the companies that have started the weekend in force. Its two cards, while they don't really stray far from the reference design, will come bundled with a coupon for a fully downloadable game, namely Dark Void, Resident Evil 5, Warmonger or Street Fighter IV.
As end-users probably know by now, the Fermi cards have full support for the CUDA technology, PhysX, 3D Vision Surround and, obviously, DirectX 11 graphics. In fact, NVIDIA built its Fermi architecture with the specific goal of achieving very high tessellation rendering. MSI's 480GTX-M2D15 and N470GTX-M2D12 also boast support for three-way SLI configurations and are designed with MSI's military class components, such as Hi-c CAP, All Solid CAP, and SSC (Solid State Choke), which “significantly enhance system stability and maintain operation stability and extend product life even in a high-loading environment.”
Now come the actual specifications of the two devices. While MSI did implement its military class parts, this doesn't seem to have allowed it to tweak the clocks in any way. For instance, the GTX 480 (N480GTX-M2D15) has the GF100 running at 700 MHz, the 1536MB of GDDR5 clocked at 3696MHz and the shaders set at 1401MHz. The card also has a 384-bit memory interface, 480 CUDA cores, 60 texture units and dual-DVI and mini HDMI outputs. The GTX 470 (N470GTX-M2D12) also sticks to reference settings, with 1280MB GDDR5, 448 UCDA cores, a 320-bit memory interface and GPU/shader/memory clocks of 607/1215/3348MHz.
The two cards will start selling in about two weeks and will have prices of $349 (N470GTX-M2D12) and $499 (N480GTX-M2D15). Full information may be found on the official website.