MSI's GeForce GTX 480 to Offer Over Voltage Too

By Marcus Yam
published

MSI advertises a more conservative 15 percent performance boost with more juice.

We saw in a previous article that Asus's GeForce GTX 480 and GTX 470 product will pack a special (supported?) feature that will allow the user to tweak the voltage to "shift into overdrive" to make things "50% faster."

Most of you figured with much sense that the "50%" figure sounded a little curious –a fact that we won't be able to investigate until after the official launch this Friday evening. But now MSI's has shown its card(s) and we can see that its offering has a similar "Over Voltage Function" that boasts a more reasonable 15% performance boost.

 

Perhaps this is early indication of the extra overclocking headroom built into the first batch of Fermi cards.

Image source: MSI.

Marcus Yam
Marcus Yam
Marcus Yam served as Tom's Hardware News Director during 2008-2014. He entered tech media in the late 90s and fondly remembers the days when an overclocked Celeron 300A and Voodoo2 SLI comprised a gaming rig with the ultimate street cred.
52 Comments Comment from the forums
  • elel
    Next generation of SLI: forget the second vid card, go for a second power supply!
    Reply
  • builderbobftw
    Wow, Somebody at MSI knows the first thing about Graphics cards, and any air cooling can't make it 50% faster!
    Reply
  • so it MSI's over volt will be a smaller thermonuclear explosion compared to asus's bigger one
    Reply
  • jennyh
    I'm so glad the rest of the tech world stop progressing so rubbish Fermi information could be made interesting.

    Oh wait my mistake, this is only happening on THG.
    Reply
  • one-shot
    Just release the damned thing already. I've seen way too many boxes, way too many volt mod cards, and have yet to see anything I'm interested in. I wonder how much nVidia is paying Toms to post ten new boxes each day?
    Reply
  • dimar
    Next: Gigabyte, XFX, and the rest will offer the same thing, yeah yeah yeah... Now if one of them would include a free 2kW 95% efficient power supply, that would be news :-)

    Reply
  • calmstateofmind
    if they have a feature where you can increase performance by 15% and it still be stable, why not make that the standard and THEN have an over voltage feature for people with better cooling set ups?

    seems more like a made up selling point than an actual over clock...especially with not a lot of people being familiar with fermi technology and its capabilities.
    Reply
  • opmopadop
    I for one am interested in these little bits of information. The title of the article did not imply you would see benchmarks. If you dont want to read it, dont get on the forum and bag it.
    Reply
  • shmung
    O
    Reply
  • tpi2007
    Well, with that kind of heatsink, with 5 heatpipes, high TDP, and 15% overvoltage, you'll have your breakfast with nice toasts ready 15% earlier :D
    Reply