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GeForce GTX 480 SLI Performance Analysis

By Kenny Yeo - 7 Apr 2010

Prepare to Get Blown Away - GeForce GTX 480 SLI Performance Analysis

The New Summit of Graphics Performance

Just last week, NVIDIA finally launched the long and eagerly awaited GeForce GTX 480. Powered by the GF100 chip that's based on the new Fermi architecture, it blitzed the opposition, easily and comfortably reclaiming the crown of world's fastest GPU from ATI.

However, reception to the card has been mixed, with most media (ourselves included) praising it for its blazing fast performance, but lamented that it's far too power hungry and hot to run.

Hold your horses and be prepared to be blown away by what should be the most dynamic pairing in graphics card history. However, it's not a setup for the faint hearted with its soaring operating temperatures.

In the meantime, NVIDIA has yet to make any comments regarding future releases based on the GF100 chip. But word on the street is that we can expect to see mainstream variants of the GF100 to arrive on store shelves around June. And if history is anything to go by, we should also see NVIDIA following in the footsteps of the GeForce GTX 295 and 9800 GX2, and create a monster card featuring twin GF100 chips in a dual-PCB card form factor – a GeForce GTX 495 perhaps?

Today, we put two GeForce GTX 480 cards setup in a SLI configuration to see just how a hypothetical GeForce GTX 495 would perform. Also, we wanted to test out NVIDIA claims about the new GF100 being more adept at performance scaling. In fact, NVIDIA proudly proclaims that the two GeForce GTX 480 cards can, in some instances, provide up to 95% in scaling performance. Loft claims but, you'll soon see that there's truth in it.

Other aspects that are of great interest is just how much power such a setup will draw, and seeing how hot a single GeForce GTX 480 runs, we also wanted to find just how bad can it get if two of them were running in a SLI configuration.

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