14 DAY TRIAL // End-users could say that it was about time for NVIDIA's manufacturing partners to start bringing out custom-designed GeForce GTX 400 Series graphics adapters and, sure enough, Palit somehow managed to heed this call and, in spite of the apparently low availability of Fermi, completed a new GTX 470. Unlike what consumers might have expected, the adapter stays faithful to the reference specifications that NVIDIA built it with. What is different, however, is the cooling module.
As consumers are well aware, the feature for which the GTX 470 and GTX 480 are best known, after their performance, is their very high operating temperatures. These temperatures, according to NVIDIA, are suitable because the GF100 GPU is designed to operate in such conditions. Summer is coming, however, which means that the reference cooler may not be able to prevent the cards, especially the GTX 480, from overheating.
To at least prevent the GTX 470 from having a hard summer, Palit outfitted it with a special cooling module that uses two fans that are 4dB quieter and push temperatures about 12 degrees lower than the stock solution. The only other difference is in the output capabilities, which are quite similar to those of AMD 5000 Series boards (dual-link DVI, HDMI and DisplayPort outputs).
As already mentioned, the video adapter retains the specifications of the video controller. Its GPU, shader and memory clocks are of 607MHz, 1,215MHz and 3,348MH, whereas the amount of memory is also unchanged (1,280MB), as is the number of cores (448) and the memory interface of 320 bits. The product also has support for DirectX 11 (obviously), NVIDIA 3D Vision, 3D Vision Surround, PhysX, CUDA, 3-way SLI, 32X Anti-aliasing, DirectCompute and OpenCL. Unfortunately, the company didn’t mention either when and where this device would launch, or how much it would cost.