14 DAY TRIAL // After a long period of time during which AMD was the sole supplier of DirectX 11 cards, NVIDIA seems to have finally managed to make the official introduction of its first tessellation monsters, the long-awaited and highly anticipated GeForce GTX 470 and GTX 480 adapters. This, of course, means that, in the time between then and now, NVIDIA's partners have been releasing their own versions one after another, with one of the latest being Gigabyte.
Gigabyte's GV-N470D5-13I-B (GTX 470) and GV-N480D5-15I-B (GTX 480) support the DirectX 11, CUDA, PhysX, 3-way SLI and 3D Vision Surround, PureVideo HD and GigaThread technologies. Furthermore, they are mostly identical to the GPU maker's original products, with the only difference being that the cooling modules are designed with a blue theme, for aesthetic purposes.
The GTX 480 has a the GF100 graphics processing unit (GPU) running at a frequency of 700MHz, the 1,536MB GDDR5 clocked at 3,696MHz and a shader clock of 1401. The device also features a 384-bit memory interface, 480 CUDA cores, 60 texture units and a thermal design power (TDP) of 250W.
As for video-output capabilities, the video board is built with dual-DVI and a mini HDMI port. The second card, the GTX 470, has 448 cores, 56 texture units, a 320-bit memory interface, 1,280MB of GDDR5 VRAM and GPU/shader/memory clocks of 607/1,215/3,348MHz. This card consumes 215W and its output options are identical to those of its sibling.
As it is the case with all other Fermi cards, Gigabyte's two models won't start shipping until April 12th. Still, they are already up for pre-order on a number of European online stores, at the now well-known prices of 499 Euro for the GTX 480 and of 349 Euro for the GTX 470. Complete information on either of the two graphics controllers may be found on the hardware maker's official website.
