Very Nice Mid High-End Card.
review by
headlessknight
GPU Specifications : GTX 470 was a high-end second tier card of the GeForce 400 family. It is based on GF100 core codenamed Fermi & use 40 nm manufacturing process. It comes with 14 streaming multiprocessors, And each single stream multiprocessor contents of 32 CUDA Cores. Making the card have a total of 448 stream processors (By multiplying 14 * 32 ) .
GTX 470 comes with 607.5 MHz/1215 Core/Shader Clocks & 3,348 MHz of the fast GDDR5 memory, along with 320-bit bandwidth, 40 ROPs & 56 TMUs.
GPU Performance :
The performance of the card is awesome, When it came out, the performance was between HD5850 & HD5870 (depending on the game and benchmark) sometimes it can even best the HD5870 at resolutions lower than 1920x1200. Not to mention that it has 256 MB more VRAM than the standard HD5870 which allows for higher levels of Anti-aliasing & Texture Quality settings. In DirectX 11... GTX 470 or generally GTX 400 series were superior to the Radeon HD 5000 series in Tessellation performance. Making the GTX 470 a better choice for gamers who play latest DirectX11 games that relies heavily on Tessellation, like for example Crysis 2 & Batman Arkham City.
GPU Overclockability :
GTX 470 is one of the best overclockers of current generation GPUs. In worst cases you might get at least 15% from the core clock out of this card (Which is the most important, since the memory overclock doesn't increase the fps as much as the core). On average most overclockers of this card attain at least 20-30% on reference cooling, making it comparable to the more expensive cards like GTX 570/480 or HD6950. Or if you are lucky enough you can get as high as 50% overclock on Watercooling or even when using high-end aftermarket air coolers. Making it perform around 85-95% of the stock GTX 580.
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Pros :
1- Pretty good performance for Full HD resolutions up to 1080p and can max out almost 90% of games at that resolution.
2- Very good overclocking potential, If you are lucky you might overclock it beyond GTX 480/570 or HD6950 performance.
3 - Offers better DirectX11 performance compared to the competition.
4- Much better vrms design than the reference GTX 570 (which is the successor of this card) making overclocking much easier without worrying about frying or overloading the vrms.
5- Supports 3-Way SLI.
6- Good for heating up the room in winter !
Drawbacks :
1- Runs at extremely high temperatures when using reference cooling.
2- Very loud fan.
3- Draw much higher power than the competition & comparable newer Nvidia cards like the GTX 560 Ti.
4- 1280 MB might be a limiting factor at high resolutions.
Ratings