GTX 480

This card indeed have heating issues but with the amount of psu you have it will just work fine and there is no need for liquid cooling my friend just go for the card and enjoy your gaming.

so just a psu fan and say two 120mm case fans should be fine for this card?

Ya i think it should be enough... hey this card don't require any external cooling solution so don't worry.

So long as your not constantly running Furmark or something similar you'll be fine, I think the heat issues have been somewhat overblown in this case.

okay thanks alot. anyone else have input on this. don't feel like dropping 500 on this card just to figure out im going to mess it up.

If your looking at getting a 480, why dont you look into getting 2 460s in sli? They run circles around the 480 and at a cheaper price also. I got rid of my 480 and went with 2 460s and the performance im getting with them is astounding.

agree with salamandr.

SLI solution is cheaper, faster and cooler.

its nto the heat of the GPU so much that concerns me with the 480, its the exposed heat plate radiating close to 80 degrees when gaming. to me that just not a healthy system. i would avoid it.

is sli easy to deal with, this is my first rig i am building/

How do you mean easy to deal with?

2xGTX460 is a cheaper and more powerfull solution than a single GTX480. Also SLI is very scalable, sometimes reaching even 100%.

2 gtx 460's is the same price as the gtx 480 i am ordering. that is if you get the 1gb version of it.

As i said, 2xGTX460 are faster (sometimes a lot faster) than a single GTX480 and even if they're the same price with a single 480, it's worth it.

okay are we talking stock gtx 460's or OC'd 460's. I have heard that 460's are not great until heavily oc'd

WTF who told you that!  

They are GREAT GPU's for the price! Get 2 non-OC'ed GTX460's, and if you feel the need, OC the hell out of them. They're very good overclockers too 

yeah, agree with everything Uknown 13 has said.

great GPUs, even at stock. two of them usually average 90 percent scaling. which puts it just behin a 5970 in terms of performance. when OCd they surpass it.
less power draw and heat than a single 480 too.

its currently the most recommended setup here at toms, and with good reason. brilliant value.

setting it up is literally a case of putting the two cards into the PCIe slots, hooking up the Power connectors and attaching an SLI bridge.

Was about to ask the same question.

A banhammer outing, that's what.

Thanks for the quick reaction  Now let's get back to the topics.

i have noticed that while running SLI while gaming, you run into a lot of microstuttering, wich is terrible. i assume this is no different?

hey if you don't want to buy gtx 460 say directly and go with the gtx 480...that's it...

I have my 460's clocked up to 815/1630/2000 with no voltage bump and Im getting 36 MORE FPS in Metro 2033 than I was getting with my 480 overclocked at the same as the 460's. Metro can bring a rig to its knees but its running at a smooth 78fps on all high settings.

I had second thoughts getting rid of my 480 due to all the stories that you hear about microstuttering. Dont worry about that because I havent noticed it or it hasnt ruined my gaming one bit. The only problem you will run into is games that dont support sli(GTA IV comes to mind) but those games are few and far between that the pros out weigh the cons in going SLI. The card is plenty strong to run your games at max settings by itself if you run into a game that doesnt support multiple gpus.

If that doesnt convince you, then you must really have your heart set on a single 480.

The microstuttering issue is overblown. I know a lot of people with SLI setups (mouse monkey included, i believe  ), but none suffer from the issue. i only every hear about it from external sources, and i think its probably less than 1 percent of SLI users that experience it. otherwise i would have encountered it by now here on toms.

Correct  , I've never seen this "microstuttering" but I believe it to be a case of not enough cache on the CPU in the cases where I've seen people complain about it.

@digvijaysingh, ask your own questions in your own thread.

woah, where did his comment go? it looks like I'm talking to myself...

EDIT: oh i see, it wasn't OP. i just assumed it was. never mind.

Best answer selected by iamnewhere.

This topic has been closed by Mousemonkey