The “Original” GTX 480 512SP Benchmarked!

Expreview got the 512SP version of the GTX 480 and posted a full review of it. If you don’t know, this is the card that should have been launched by NVIDIA 4 months ago representing the highest performing card of the GF100 lineup.

But, they were forced to reduce the number of stream processors from 512 to 480 and to reduce the frequencies to solve problems of high power consumption and high temperature in addition to general instability of the cards under load.

So, lets see if they really solved these problems after about 4 months of learning from faults!

First, lets compare the specs of both the 512SP and 480SP version:

The (512SP) version features 1 additional SM (Streaming Multiprocessor) unit which includes:

- 32 Cuda Cores (SPs)

- 1 Polymorph Engine

- 4 Texture units

- 16 Load/Store units

- 4 SFUs (Special Function Units)

- 64KB configurable L1 Cache/Shared Memory

- 2 Warp Schedulers and dispatch units.

The following figure shows what the additional Streaming Multiprocessor (SM) includes:

Now, lets take a look at the card itself; The PCB Design, Performance, Power Consumption and Temperature.

This card is cooled by the powerful Accelero Xtreme Plus:

GPU-Z shows the frequencies and specs:

A Closer Look:

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PCB Design:

- 8+2 phase power design

- UBIQ SO-8 Mosfet

- KEMET Tantalum capacitors

- 12 Samsung 0.4ns GDDR5 memory chips

Closeups:

Now, the Benchmarks:

Only 5.67% is the performance advantage of the 512SP version over the 480SP, but notice that these benchmarks were done when both cards are equally clocked. The 512SP version comes with higher clocks and is not reviewed by Expreview at these clocks!

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Power Consumption:

Furmark made this card consume 644Watts of power, which is around 46% higher than the 480SP version. Knowing that the 480SP is supplied by 1.000 volts and the 512SP by 1.056, Only 0.056 more voltage caused this Enormous 204W difference!

What about the temperature?!

94 degrees with a fan speed of 92% … hmmm, not good knowing that it’s cooled by a high end cooler!

In my humble opinion, the decision of NVIDIA’s engineers to reduce the SPs and frequencies was very wise. NVIDIA is now refreshing the lineup and we saw the GTX 460 which showed the real potential of the architecture. So you should wait for REAL refreshes + ATI’s Southern Islands!

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