Power Consumption and Conclusions
I don’t think anyone was expecting miracles here so it comes as no surprise that the SLI configurations use noticeably more power than the single card setups. For the GTX 480s, the second card adds 278 watts to the peak load while the second GTX 470 added 200 watts to the total system power consumption. These are significant power consumption increases to go along with the significant performance increases that NVIDIA’s Fermi-based SLI configurations offer. For reference, adding a second Radeon HD 5870 1GB card to create a dual-GPU CrossFire X configuration only increased total power consumption by about 140 watts – more than a bit of difference there!
If you plan on using a GTX 480 SLI configuration make sure you keep that 726 watt number in the back of your mind and get a 850+ watt power supply that will get the job done!
Performance
I think it goes without saying that we are really impressed with the scaling performance of the NVIDIA GF100-based GeForce GTX 480 and GTX 470 graphics cards. In nearly all of our tests adding in the second GTX 480 resulted in performance increases as high as 80% and very rarely went below 40-50% when looking at resolutions of 1920×1200 or higher. The GTX 470 looked even better in our testing as the average scaling for a pair of the cards over a single was higher than the GTX 480s; this makes sense because the GTX 470 would be less CPU-bound in any given gaming title than the GTX 480 would be.
The only title we really saw with less than ideal results was DiRT 2 – something odd was happening in our configuration, either due to the NVIDIA driver or to some game engine issue, and it appeared that the second GPU would suddenly become disinterested in participating. We have sent a question to NVIDIA about it and are hoping to hear something soon.
I was even pleased to see that many of the games we tested scaled at resolutions as low as 1680×1050 – something that SLI and CrossFire configurations had not done in recent history. The performance differences between a single GPU and the pair increased as our resolution went up, as expected, but it would appear that with the NVIDIA Fermi architecture users will be able to get benefits from adding a second card even if they don’t have a 30-in monitor to power.
Features
I am not going to go over all of the new features on the GF100-series of graphics cards again, but if you want a refresher be sure to check out our original GTX 480/470 review. What I will mention is what you can get with an SLI configuration that you wouldn’t be able to get without it: NVIDIA Surround and 3D Vision Surround support. Despite the complaints of myself and many other media outlets about the lateness in the NVIDIA Surround features, they are coming very soon and without breaking NDAs, I can assure you that we will have coverage of it before the end of the month. How will it compare to AMD’s Eyefinity technology and whether or not you see it as a pro or con that you are required to have a pair of graphics cards to pursue it are among the issues we will address in that future article.
Needless to say we are eager to have NVIDIA enter this market and hopefully we will see even more aggressive implementation of multi-monitor gaming support from developers as more and more customers have access to the technology.
Pricing and Availability
One of the draw backs to requiring an SLI configuration for NVIDIA Surround is the added cost; you are required to either have a set of two cards or a very specific combination of a dual-GPU graphics cards and displays (which we’ll talk about later in June). As of this writing here are some of the relevant prices for graphics cards:
- GeForce GTX 480 – $489
- GeForce GTX 470 – $339
- GeForce GTX 465 – $279
- Radeon HD 5970 – $699
- Radeon HD 5870 – $389
- Radeon HD 5850 – $289
Final Thoughts
After what felt like years (but was only months) of AMD dominance in the high-end discrete graphics market, NVIDIA’s GF100 GPU release in March of this year finally gives us a competitive marketplace to write about. The short story is that NVIDIA has created performance competitive and price competitive graphics cards that fall slightly behind in terms of noise and power consumption / power efficiency. Some readers will find the power/heat/noise issues a real draw back but I think that most enthusiasts and consumers worried about gaming performance are much more interested in value for your dollar than anything else. Our SLI testing with the GTX 480 and GTX 470 proved that NVIDIA has spent some time with the hardware and driver to tweak for incredible multi-GPU scaling – we saw as much as 87% scaling in some of our real-world gaming scenarios and even witnessed a good amount of scaling at resolutions as low as 1680×1050. That scaling performance will come in very handy for SLI users that plan on taking NVIDIA up on its offer for NVIDIA Surround or NVIDIA 3D Vision Surround when it is available later this summer.
