Nvidia GTX 480 3-Way SLI Tested Against Radeons
Fight!
Hardware.Info managed to snag not one, but three Nvidia GTX 480 cards and mashed them together (translated) in a 3-way SLI shootout against three ATI Radeon HD 5870 in triple-CrossFire. A dual-CrossFire 5970 was thrown in for good measure too.
For a large number of tests, even the dual-CrossFire 5970 configuration held its own, as well as the triple-CrossFire. As of this writing, GTX 480's are available in very low quantities and many gamers will find it difficult to snag one until Nvidia ramps up production.
After looking through the benchmarks, it's still very clear that the best bang for the buck title remains squarely in ATI's corner of the ring. While both ATI and Nvidia count on high yields to bring prices down, it's still unclear when consumers can see the results.
Hardware.Info ran its test with Intel's latest Core i7 980X 6-core processor. What they found was that ATI's triple-CrossFire scales far better than Nvidia's solution. According to the tests, adding a fourth GTX 480 will only give gamers roughly a 12.7% performance increase, which doesn't justify the cost as well as increased power consumption.
In fact, during load, the triple-CrossFire 5870 setup was running at 641 watts while the GTX 480 setup was consuming a whopping 937 watts--just shy of one kilowatt.
- Nvidia,
- ATI,
- AMD,
- Build Your Own,
- gtx-480 ,
- radeon-5870 ,
- crossfire ,
- sli
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1.21 kilowatts! Great Scott! lol
AND I MEANT ATI will be coming otu with the refresh. XD how te f do i edit messages?
Impressive, they need 46% more juice than the radeons and they can`t even keep beeing the best overall in the games, they shine only in sponsored nvidia titles from what i see on that site. This reminds me of Adobe and their CS5 suite wich not only forces the consumer to get an nvidia CUDA capable card, they force you to buy only Specific high priced nvidia CUDA cards. I'm starting to feel sick of this nvidia bullshit.
Hot oven is hot.
AND I MEANT ATI will be coming otu with the refresh. XD how te f do i edit messages?
Click "Read the comments on the Forums" then proceed to edit from there.
Surely we are likely to see some performance boosts once the drivers have matured?
Man the problem with SLI and crossfire X is finding mobos with 3 PCI-E slots that can run at full 16x speeds, and having the cards actually fit in there... also when are ATI going to fix their 5970s? those cards are acting really strange, sometimes giving the performance of a single 5870 or worse..... would love to see them at their full potential, or near it!!
Surely we are likely to see some performance boosts once the drivers have matured?
I don`t wanna imply that they don`t bring new tweaks to their drivers but usually it`s about some numbers in the most used benchmarks out there since on my card i never saw the boost that they talk about in their driver updates, is more like lets see how good we can tweak the driver to perform as best as it can for these particular benchmarks. It happened in the past to bouth the companies be it ATI or Nvidia.
I bet that can fry eggs!
who is seriously in the right mind to do such a thing though? I mean, 3 GTX480s? Who needs so much power?
not to mention you need a small nuclear power plant to power that rig...
Im sure fermi will come good at some point in the future, I'm sure the benchmarks proved that the architecture was better suited to the stresses of DX11, until we start to see games that really use DX11 though you would have to be rich/a moron/both to buy one....if you can actually get your hands on one that is.
I bet that can fry eggs!
Can people stop repeating the same old jokes a million times? This particular one wasn't even funny when it was first made.
On the bright side, you can save money from buying and using a heater during the winter, 3 Fermis will be more than adequate, so it's not so bad. I bet that's nVidia's bonus feature to their customers!!
Nvidia is turning into netburst Intel...
Nvidia is beginning to ferment into Netburst Intel...
I was actually expecting to see some charts and numbers.... silly me
crap. i double posted. sorry guys, i didn't realize.
wow tri crossfire 5870 beats "quad" crossfire 5970 in alot of tests. seems to be no point to the 5970.
tri sli 480 holds its own, people are so negative.
Nvidia = Fail
I was actually expecting to see some charts and numbers.... silly me
Usually blue text in a browser means a link, try to click it in the article, and your wish will be done, here you go maybe you won't be able to locate that in the article above.
http://translate.googleusercontent [...] uf_iell90g
Does this page load incorrectly for any other Chrome users out there? The image and arrows at the top look weird. Did the same thing to me on FF.
Nice setup
You need a liquid nitrogen to cool those 480s and a portable nuclear plant to power them up.
What was Nvidia really thinking?.....
Let me rephrase that, "Why Nvidia wasn't thinking?"
So they got 3 GTX 480's heh ? That means the rest of the world won't have any left to play with hehehe
I would very much like to be informed what is the room temperature of a setup like that in the middle of summer! 937 watts... that could definitely fry an egg - it's called the "3-way SLI pan"
We should hope nVidia dose better, because right now ATI is kicking some ass and will get lazy if the competition is lax.
1.21 kilowatts! Great Scott! lol
Gigawatts buddy.
This is very interesting but I insist on seeing the benchmarks.
I still don't get why they took so long and delivered a graphics card that is not that impressive.
Although I like ATI, the tessellation it's quite impressive, the only problem is the price point and consumption.
For example, I now have an ATI 4870 and i know is not a big deal but if you could see how much do graphic card cost in here you would do the same. And having this card I'd like to have one from the new family just be cause they consume less power while in idle which is most of the time.
Give me a thumbs down but both sides are overkill. A good single card with a good CPU is all you really need.
Geez my puny PSU only is 620W rated! Yiks 8(
Is it still viable to use ONE Nvidia card (for PhysX calculation) along with maybe dual ATI in crossfire setup?
I would love to build new gaming rig using ATI card this time after many years on Nvidia....
I think this article is a bit sensational with it's summary... Dual SLI seems to beat Dual CrossFireX fairly easily. Triple SLI vs. Triple CrossFireX is obviously a different story (although, that may change slightly in the future depending on driver updates). While the cost of either solution is quite high, I think Nvidia may be banking on the fact that very few people actually use a triple SLI setup. Actual value based on power draw is tough to determine over time, but I'd say it's probably not much of a concern if you can afford to assemble one of these massive gaming rigs to begin with.
1 kilowatt... Holy energy waste Batman!
where are the damn benchmarks??