[Solved] Should I buy this? (watercooled EVga GTX 480)

It has come to my attention that one of the biggest concerns most people are having about GTX 470/480 is that the card is rated to run at 106º C and hovers around 91ºC. So this massive amount of heat I think could be more efficiently dispensed with a water-cooling system as opposed to air cooling/heat-pipes.

I guess Evga is one step ahead of the game with this

http://www.evga.com/products/moreI [...] s%20Family

So what do you guys think? Will water cooling be much better than the stock fans/heat-pipes?

EDIT: I changed the product from the Hydro-copper GTX 480 to the 470. I have waited 2-3 years. the last card I had was a 7950 GT and that died about a year ago and I've been using my friends extra 8800 GS since then.
If I get a GTX 470 I am definitely thinking about setting up a water cooling system. If for nothing else than the 470!

Sorry, I wasn't very clear in my original post, the point of this post was not to discuss if I should actually buy this $500 GTX 470 but rather if a water-cooling solution would be far superior to air/pipes in the GTX series.

Could the noise and heat problem be addressed properly with a water-cooling solution?

Your money not mine. If your goal is to do a lot of benchmarking and overclock a lot by all means.

No, You should buy this:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Prod [...] -_-Product

please read my edit.

I have 3 GTX275s and I am thinking about it but I don't think it is worth it. I was shocked about how little of an improvement they truely are. I think this is an example of companies making smaller steps with product improvements in order to bring in more money from those who want the best of the best all the time.

Dude this thread was supposed to talk about the advantages of water-cooling a GPU.

Instead it turned into a pissing contest between NVidia and ATI fanboys. All the wackos have come out of the wood work to tout the superiority of their brand decision.

Water cooling versus air cooling. Usually water cooling allows for higher overclocks since it is more effective than air cooling. Noise wise it is depending on the type of radiator (think fans). There is really no reason to go for water cooling except for the bling factor and/or determination to overclock to the max or record breaking with benchmarks.

I have GTX275's liquid cooled and I wouldn't go any other way. I think it depends alot on your setup. The ability of a component to cool itself is a function of air tempurature and air movement. If you have a well cooled system right now then the added tempurature these cards would provide should be ok without being liquid cooled. If your system runs hot then you should look at liquid cooling. Do you have a dual loop cooling system? Do you have AC in your house? That the kind of cost to performance that you need to consider.

I was not looking to overclock or get crazy benchmarks for the most part. I just wanted an efficient, silent, cooling device. I'm not in it for the bling factor, although putting it together would be fun.

My house is ok, my room gets hot in the summer. But I just bought a new case HAF 932 and transferred all my parts into the new case. My tempts went from 70º C down to 30ºC no joke.

Word to the wise, if it's been more than a year since you cleaned your parts, do it! It's therapeutic take all your parts out of your case lay them down, use dust off on them, clean out your case, psu, heatsinks, GPU. It should be like a spring cleaning thing to do at least once a year.

Also something I've noticed is that there is no information regarding warranties on GTX cards. It's like what if yours craps out. How long would that RMA process take

Honestly zilla, we're trying to help you. You're spending too much money for too little gain. In a HAF932, even an HD5970 will run cool.

Why?

Why not just get 1 400$ 5870 or a 280$ 5850?

Yeh, why don't you just return the 480 or 470 get yourself a 5870? It performs almost the same and runs much cooler. The 5970 costs a bit more, but performs much better and gives off the same amount of heat.

Metro has like 8 hours of gamplay.

EDIT: Wrong thread lol.

So in general water cooling on average will perform how much better than air? I'm also looking at getting a new cooler for my CPU and can't decide between the Corsair H50 and something like a CM V8.

You only need water cooling if you buy a hot card. This is a very nice card for the money:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Prod [...] -_-Product

They can't make a dual core GTX 480. Not even a dual core GTX 470. The PCIe standard allows a maximum of 300W/slot and it is really enforced in Europe. And that's one of the reasons why they had to cut down on the frequency. That and the heat. ATI stilll has some room for its single GPU cards.

yea it did. the 295 is 2 gtx 260 gpu's whereas radeons 5970 is 2 5870 gpus

NO it does not, it uses two- GTX 275's which launched under that name/ #~acronym after the GTX 295 was on the scene.
http://www.tomshardware.com/review [...] ,2298.html

edit and gtx 275's (shock) are rated at 219 tdp * Zomg , how did Nvidia do it? The same way ATI did with the 5970/5870 kiddies.
http://www.nvidia.com/object/produ [...] 75_us.html

OMG this forum is getting flooded with ati fanboys

It is getting rather unpleasant navigate tom hardware forums, every time some one ask a question regarding nvidia fermi cards, the thread get flooded with biased ati fanboys with no life, i would hate to see this fuk transform on to a one sided biased one like semiaccurate crap´


the gtx 480 is the best fastest single gpu, in some cases and certain res it perform even faster on on par to the 5970, overall it is 10/20% than the 5870 in some games shows a 40% lead, it will only get better as drivers mature and directx 11 specific games come out

fermi architecture is far superior on dx 11 and tessellation, scales much better on SLI than ati CF, and its is much faster for Anti aliasing


In top of all that fermi is for much more than just gaming, it naively supports C++ lenguage and has a huge potential on the GPGPU field with its cuda applications



And to all the people saying that fermi heat would kill the card: You are utterly wrong nvidia confirmed that fermi is designed to run on hot temps and that wont affect the cards life


Fun fact: dual sli gtx 480 fermi performs on par and sometimes is even faster than quad crossfire 5970
not to mention dual sli gtx 480 costs 1000$ whereas quad crossfire 5970 cost 1400$ and scales terribly, gtx 480 performance will only get better after drivers mature and games that utilize dx 11 more heavily release

Funny how you ask mods to block the thread after you ignorantly bashed on fermi, i just cant stand fanboys

Some benchmarks here and here check all benchs

In most cases the gtx 480 has a 20% lead over the 5870, depending of the scenario it even gets a 40% on certain games and resolution especially with AA enabled to x4/8/x16

In some cases It gets very close in performance to the 5970 and sometimes slightly better, keep in mind the 5970 is 200$ more expensive and a dual gpu

I don't know know you mean by 25% but the gtx 480 is over 5 times more powerful on cuda folding than the 285gtx that helped with the new architecture made up for monster parallel processing capabilities. Just look at the numbers

and "dream on"
Sure fanboy, keep in mind the 200 series are already doing great on the GPGPU field

fermi is designed to work on the 90/100 c, and the wholle hype about crazy temperatures is not as bad as many are trying to make it look like, most of the times with fans cracked up to 70% it reaches at full load 90C


Besides anyone who spends 500$+ on graphics cards, wont have an issues with either heat or power consumption, meaning they would have a good ventilated case with at-least air cooling


Funny how you didn't reply on the sli subject, cause right now dual sli gtx 480 is the most strong configuration in most cases performs on par or better than quad 5970 because it scales terribly, which bt would cost 400$ more than dual fermi

That added fermi Superior architecture i.e (dx 11. gpgpu/cuda, AA,rt) made up for a very good configuration specially if you are planing on going SLI

Look dude i am NOT trying to impose my gpu brad preference here, all i am trying to do is show that fermi actually is a great card, because i am tired of the whole fanboish bashing on nvidia that it been going around here, it feels almost as the biased semi-accurate forums right now tone it down, the OP for example ask for help deciding water coooling and most of the users replied with useless posts that didnt help the OP saying things like "get the 5870 or get the 5970" "ati is better nvdia is no good"

And there is no end of the Wrongness of this statement.

" cause right now dual sli gtx 480 is the most strong configuration"

Here's some faster configs:
4 GTX 480

4 5870

2 5970

3 GTX 480

4 GTX 470

3 GTX 470

4 5850

OWND

THink before you type. That's 6 configs faster than you're "Fastest"

^ Yep. THe funny thing is that the 5970 is bewteen a 470 and a 480 in power consumption, but bewteen a 470SLI and a 480SLI in power.

(5970 is 2 5870 cores, with only a very small downclock, unlike the 5850, wich his disabled shader cores)

5970>470 SLI

Keep in mid that the 5970 is 2 5870 cxhips, not 5850 chips.

It just out of power concern (SOmething NV has thrwn to the wind) that the 5970 is slightly downclocked.

IT realy is a 5870X2 not a 5850X2, and 5870>470.

But it's rather lcoe, in the end it comes down to Power usage and heat (And 2 PCIe used versus 1 PCIe used)

And

4 480

4 5870/ 5970 CF

4 470

3 480

4 5850

3 5870/ 5970 5870 Tri

2 480

5970/5870CF

5850CF


4870 Quad/Tri

4890 CF

480

GTX 295

4870 X2

5870

470

5850

4890

5830

4870

5770


GTS 250/4850/5750

(Stuff that can't play Crysis Down below here )

I think I'm wasting my time read the link. Btw there is no 4 way sli. The only 4 way card sli is a 285 gtx by evga.

I can't vouche for all of mine bur I am 100% sure 480 gtx 3 way > 5970 cf

Classifieds aren't out yet only 285 gtx... Either or the most powerful system is 3 480s. Look at the benchies even 2 480s beat 2 5970s indome benchies.

Don't give credit where it isn't need or where it isn't deserved, and plz don't speak because of paper benchmarks. Optimization is everything and 4 gpus are just a waste as u can see.

Anything over 2 cards is a gimmick I ha a 5979 and 5870 in cf and I got terrible min frames... Especially on l4d 2 I had to disable the 5870 to get the min to go up

Look at the website and stop just "talking". Clearly see optimization for quads isn't there.

Ur doing plain math for something that doesn't work on plain math math. Just because 1 5970 beats a 480 doesn't mean 2 will be 2.

IT DOESN'T WORK THATWAY!

Look at multithreading...how many programs use EVERYTHINg? Crysis can't do more than 2 cards it's a known fact that it doestnt scale properly.

Please stop assuming.

Each time u add a gpu ur scalingcanbecut in half.

Again look at the link