A more palatable version of the GTX 470 card than we’ve seen before. Did you see what we did thar?
The GTX470 seems to be the perfect card for many manufacturers: the TDP is within realistic limits for aftermarket cooling, the core is generally pliable enough to eke out a factory overclock, the PCB and power delivery system can be tweaked for a more cost-effective design and more importantly - there actually seems to be a decent volume of cores for them. This brings us to Palit's offering of the GTX470, and while it has all the things listed above save a factory overclock, it still has a lot of challenges to overcome.
Firstly and most importantly, Palit has custom-designed the PCB and cooling system to great effect. Though the heatsink is a relatively standard affair (take a lump of copper, throw in a few heatpipes and whack some aluminium fins in there), its two fans do a much better job of cooling the card evenly along its length, and also keeping the power regulation under control. It looks visually interesting enough, but the performance of the cooler is great - idling at 40 degrees with an impressive load of 78. Palit's design is ten degrees cooler at load than the reference GTX470 design, though it generates 59.0dBA while idling and 65.6dBA at load. This is similar to the reference design, but as it's cooler, it is also better.
This is made even more impressive by the specifications of the GF100 'Fermi' core Palit has chosen to run inside the card, boasting 448 CUDA Cores and 1280MB of GDDR5 on a 320-bit bus. That particular core engenders a TDP rating of 215W, so Palit's cooler is very welcome here.
The enhanced cooling also lends a helping hand when overclocking, and unlike the Galaxy GTX470 GC from last issue, the Palit card's core increased by a whopping 28 per cent to 781MHz (+173). We could also increase the memory clocks by five per cent (+44), though this was not particularly breathtaking.
Performance in games was solid, pulling playable average frames in Crysis with a flawless showing in GRID. The GTX470 should be more than enough to play most games at decent settings for the foreseeable future. Unigine shows good scores with tessellation enabled as per NVIDIA's tessellation-optimised architecture, though the gap between it and a 5850 closes when tessellation is not used. 3DMark Vantage pulls a nice P17890 score, though this is inflated somewhat by PhysX.
Though performance at stock is good, overclocking the card by our large margins resulted in great performance, pulling in 3969 more points for an overclocked score of P21859. This represents a performance boost of 22 per cent without additional costs other than time taken to get clocks stable. That the card is so good at overclocking is interesting; but even more so is why Palit didn't overclock it from the factory. Amusingly the packaging claims that a game is included, but this is simply the free 'Supersonic Sled' demo available from NVIDIA.
Irrespective of these decisions the card commands the nauseatingly high price point of all GTX470 cards, running in at a cost of $500. Unless technologies like PhysX and CUDA are specifically needed this is quite a lot to pay, especially when a 5850 or 5870 would do the same or better for less money. Tessellation isn't really a consideration at this stage in the hardware game; support is important, but integration into game titles at this time is limited.
Ultimately this card takes the disappointing GTX470 design and improves it - but shows that there's only so much that can be changed.
Issue: 137 | June, 2012