October 1st, 2010
ASUS ENGTX480/2DI/1536MD5 GeForce GTX 480 Review @ BenchmarkReviews
Benchmark Reviews tests the GF100 Fermi GPU six months after its launch, and is reminded that refined construction process and mature firmware can make a significant difference.
Back in late March (2010) when Benchmark Reviews revealed NVIDIA’s GeForce GTX 480 video card, Fermi fever was hot and expectations were unreasonably high. After months of wild rumor and inaccurate speculation, the enthusiast community was finally able to purchase the worlds most powerful single-GPU graphics card. As this article is written, it’s been half a year since that launch and the landscape has hardly changed. NVIDIA still sells the most powerful graphics processor made, and the competition has resorted to a low and middle-market focus on value over pure performance. Fortunately for NVIDIA, their launch of the GeForce GTX-460 and GTS-450 product lines have made the value play extremely difficult for AMD. Yet, for a select few with money set aside for elite-level graphics, the top-end GeForce GTX 480 video card still offers good reason for purchase.
In this article, Benchmark Reviews tests the ASUS ENGTX480/2DI/1536MD5 GeForce GTX 480 video card. This GF-100 GPU Fermi-based graphics card is the key to many things: high-performance 3D-Vision and 3D-Vision Surround, unmatched PhysX potential, and one part of an unbeatable SLI set. NVIDIA Forceware driver optimizations and firmware refinements have turned the GTX 480 into the video card it should have been from day one, reducing operating temperatures over the original production samples and improving power consumption and fan noise. Priced at $486, the ASUS ENGTX480/2DI/1536MD5 empowers DirectX-11 video games to deliver unmatched geometric realism. Our benchmark tests compare 3D frame rate performance with the ASUS GeForce GTX 480 in single-card and SLI-modes against some of the most powerful graphics products on the market.
