GeForce GTX 470 Dual Fan Cooler review

When NVIDIA released their GeForce GTX 480 the heat levels had to be compensated for somehow, NVIDIA opting for a cooling solution that is rather loud. With the release of the GeForce GTX 470 things had gotten a fraction better, but the GPU was still putting out lots of heat and as a result the cooling fan rotation of the cooling solution had to be configured at a high-RPM, again making the product noisy when in full use.

As such many NVIDIA board partners went on a quest to find better 3rd party solutions. A handful of the AIB/AIC partners managed to put some interesting stuff on the table. Palit was amongst the first to say it out loud and proud; "we have a custom cooling solution for the GeForce GTX 470".

Guess what we'll be testing today? Yep -- The Palit GeForce GTX 470 with dual-fan custom cooling. A pretty nice card as right now the prices have dropped a little on the GTX 470. We spot prices starting at 315 EUR for the product we test today. Will it be good? Will it be able to handle the heat levels and keep noise under control? I mean, Palit has put a heatpipe based cooling solution on top of the GTX 470 with two active fans.

Well, you are here to find it all out, head on over to the next page, but not before you've had a good look at the product tested, and you'll agree with me... aesthetically this is a good looking card design.

  Gigabyte GeForce GTX 470 SOC review

When NVIDIA released their GeForce GTX 480 the first issue that arrised was a very hot chip. The heat levels had to be compensated for somehow, NVIDIA opted for a cooling solution that was rather loud. With the release of the GeForce GTX 470 things had gotten a fraction better, but the GPU was still putting out lots of heat and as a result the cooling fan rotation of the cooling solution had to be configured at a high-RPM, making both products very noisy when fully stressed.

As such many NVIDIA board partners went on a quest to find better 3rd party solutions but only a handful of the AIB/AIC partners managed to actually put some interesting stuff on the table.

Gigabyte is now saying it out loud and proud; "we have a custom cooling solution for the GeForce GTX 470". Next to that they improved the PCB, applied 3-way fan cooling and overclocked the board. All facts combined created the Gigabyte GeForce GTX 470 SOC edition (Super Overclock).

A really nice card we can say right away. Right now prices are dropping thanks to competition from ATI, but also the popular GeForce GTX 460 paved the way for price-drops. We spot prices starting at 350 EUR for the product we test today. Will it be good? Will it be able to handle the heat levels and keep noise under control? I mean, Gigabyte applied really serious heat pipe based cooling solution on top of the GTX 470 with three active fans.

Well, you are here to find it all out, head on over to the next page, but not before you've had a good look at the product tested, and you'll agree with me... aesthetically this is a good looking card design.

GeForce GTX 470 2 and 3-way SLI review

Multi-GPU gaming has become popular over the past few year mostly thanks to NVIDIA's SLI solutions and obviously later on ATI Crossfire. There is however always an interesting fact to monitor at all times, the more GPU's you add, the more problems you'll run into performance, scaling wise. A week or two ago when we posted our 3-way SLI GeForce GTX480 review we where however intrigued by the 'overall' good scaling of the GF100 GPU embedded on that graphics card. And despite the fact that even with three cards (GPUs) you'll quickly run into CPU bottlenecks, it just somehow did not disappoint.

So that made us wonder what would happen if we took three much cheaper GeForce GXT 470 graphics cards, I mean .. you save 150 bucks per card over a GTX 480, and that could make a huge difference both price and performance wise.

The Fermi based cards however are still hard to get and it was a bit of a struggle to get a good quantity of cards for testing in house. So today's article has been made with the friendly help of Point of View graphics and Zotac who both submitted a card for this article, combined with our reference sample we can now bring you the second article in a series of SLI articles based on the GeForce GTX 400 series graphics cards. GeForce GTX 400 series might have had a rough start but if we filter out the mighty thorn of this release, the heat and noise levels, then for a minute everybody can wholeheartedly admit that they are beautifully performing graphics cards.

As a result today we'll 'finally' have a look at the SLI scaling of that GeForce GTX 470. We look at single card performance, dual-card performance but also triple (3-way) SLI performance to see how well these puppies will scale.

The article will first cover SLI performance among the new GTX 470s in several configurations and games, and then we'll check a little one on one with 2-way Multi-GPU gaming in a multi-GPU slaughter-fest article in the ATI versus NVIDIA kind of way, to see who and what scales the best.

Over the next few pages we'll tell you a bit about multi-GPU gaming, the challenges, the requirements and of course a nice tasty benchmark session.