14 DAY TRIAL // In the short period of time between NVIDIA's official introduction of the GF100 cards and now, most, if not all of NVIDIA's partners have come out and shown off their own versions of the GeForce GTX 470 and GTX 480. These companies, with a few exceptions, have all remained faithful to NVIDIA's stock specifications. Now, to close the circle and complete the wide range of competing devices, Zotac and Sparkle have unleashed their own respective products.
Each company has two adapters, one GTX 470 and one GTX 480, which sport their makers' respective logos. This small distinctive quality is also their only one. The two pairs of graphics controllers are very much identical, spec-wise, to their stock versions. They have full support for CUDA, PhysX, 3D Vision Surround Sound, Open GL 3.3 (and soon 4.0) and, of course, DirectX 11 graphics. In fact, NVIDIA designed its graphics cards with the specific purpose of enabling unprecedented performance during tessellation rendering, even at the cost of higher operating temperatures and power consumption.
Zotac's and Sparkle's GTX 470 have 448 CUDA cores, 1280MB GDDR5 memory with a clock speed of 3348MHz, a 320-bit memory interface, a GPU clock of 607MHz and a shader clock of 1215 MHz. The GeForce GTX 480 is, as consumers must know well by now, more powerful. It has 480 cores, 1536MB GDDR5 VRAM, an interface of 384 bits and GPU/shader/memory clocks of 700/1401/3696 MHz. Finally, all four models support 3-way SLI configurations, for ultimate performance scalability.
Sparkle's cards should show up on shelves around April 12, but their prices have not been mentioned, although they shouldn't stray too far from the $349 (GTX 470) and $499(GTX 480) that NVIDIA itself suggested. As for Zotac's models, they will start selling around the same time but are already up for pre-order, at 341 Euro and 499 Euro respectively.
