14 DAY TRIAL // The hype surrounding NVIDIA's upcoming GTX 470 and 480 graphics cards has reached such high levels that even Intel's recently launched six-core Gulftown got less attention than the various, and mostly information-deprived, leaks related to the adapters. So far, mystery has continued to shroud the actual specs of the cards, but it seems that the long-awaited moment when they are revealed has finally come.
What the two boards have in common is their support for three-way SLI, CUDA support, 3D Vision Surround technology, PhysX implementation and identical video output options, namely dual DVI and HDMI. This feature set adds to the already obvious support for all DirectX 11 graphics features.
The online entity that managed to get a hold of the GTX 470 and GTX 480 product specifications is Expreview and, from what they look like, the architecture used in the cards' construction is different from the one NVIDIA has developed so far. The main curiosity lies in the unusual performance numbers, which, while somewhat lower than the strongest competing products from AMD, hint at a possibly different approach to graphics processing.
The GeForce GTX 470 has a GPU clock of 607MHz, 448 CUDA Cores, a shader frequency of 1215MHz and 1280MB of GDDR5 memory, This VRAM operates on a 384-bit memory interface and has a frequency of 1674MHz, or 3348 MHz DDR. The card also has a thermal design power (TDP) of 225W and draws the necessary energy not just from the PCI Express slot, but also from the power supply, through two PCI Express power connectors, of which one has six pins and the other eight.
The more powerful GeForce GTX 480 has 480 CUDA cores and its graphics processing unit runs at 700MHz. Also, the amount of memory is confirmed at 1536MB, runs at 1,848 (3,696) MHz and has the same 384-bit interface as the GTX 470. Furthermore, the shader frequency is set at 1,041MHz and the TDP is of 295W. Power is drawn through the same six-pin + eight-pin power connector combination.
It is still unclear why and how NVIDIA gave its graphics adapters such unusual clock speeds, but all will be made clear once the company makes the formal announcement on March 26. Until then, end-users will be able to happily contemplate the rather decent price tags of $349 for the GTX 470 and $499 for the GTX 480.
