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NVIDIA GeForce GTX 470 - The Second Fermi Card

By Kenny Yeo - 10 Apr 2010

Temperature and Power Consumption

Temperature

As the graph below shows, the GeForce GTX 470 is one hot card. A maximum sustained operating temperature of a staggering 93 degrees Celsius was recorded while running 3DMark Vantage, making it a smidge hotter than a GeForce GTX 480, and over 10 and 19 degrees Celsius warmer than a Radeon HD 5870 and Radeon HD 5850 respectively. Users with compact casings will certainly need to rethink and improve their casing's ventilation to ensure fitting a GeForce GTX 470 doesn't have unintended consequences.

Power Consumption

Power consumption figures are also in keeping with what's expected from the GF100 chip. The highest sustained reading we recorded was 284W. Now although this is a marked improvement over a GeForce GTX 480's 332W peak power reading, it is still some distance ahead of Radeon HD 5870 and HD 5850, which recorded 238W and 217W respectively.

To address concerns regarding the GF100 chip's high power consumption, NVIDIA has recently released a paper titled “A Perspective on Power”. In it, NVIDIA claims that the GF100 chip was designed to specifically tackle DirectX 11 applications and that if you were to run DirectX 11 games, you'll see that the new cards will be power efficient compared to ATI's Evergreen offerings. The paper also states that with DirectX 10 games, the performance to watt ratio will be comparable.

While we can't comment on performance to watt ratios on DirectX 11 games (since we take the readings when the system is running 3DMark Vantage), we can certainly comment on NVIDIA's claims that performance to watt ratio is identical on DirectX 10 applications. 3DMark Vantage is a DirectX 10 specific benchmark and if we look back at our result analysis earlier, you'll find that the new GeForce GTX 470 scored identically to the Radeon HD 5850, and if you look at the power consumption figures here, then it is evident that the Radeon HD 5850 is the more power efficient card. Of course, this is by no means a conclusive test, but it does show just how power hungry the GeForce GTX 470 is while running 3DMark Vantage, at least.

That said, it is worth investigating NVIDIA claims about power efficiency on DirectX 11 applications, and we are looking to address that in a future article.

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7.5
  • Performance 8
  • Features 8.5
  • Value 7
The Good
High-end performance
Compact size
The Bad
Not competitively priced
Suffers the same heat, noise and thermal problems as the GeForce GTX 480
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