Saturday May 26, 2012 6:40 PM AEST

Atomic MPC > User Reviews > fnhostyle > User review - GIGABYTE's GTX470 is hot...

GIGABYTE's GTX470 is hot...

By fnhostyle
10:00 Jul 7, 2010

Those women you see in the fishnet stockings.

People that ring up asking for personal information.

I recently purchased this card as a replacement for my 8800GTS. I chose the gtx470 mainly because of the amount of memory it had for the price and I thought installation would be easier as I already had nvidia drivers installed. I did a few benchmarks prior to installing the card and a lot more once the card was installed,

I won't go into much detail as I cannot add pictures ..but ..

Stonegiant a program from Bitsquid, was running at 49fps in most places without tessellation turned on. that was with the 8800gts, and 125fps no tessellation or 98fps with tessellation on the gtx470.

The demo of Just Cause runs an average of 61fps with everything on high or "on" with x4 anti-aliasing and x4 anisotropic filtering. But the gpu heat got a bit excessive ...92 degrees Celsius on the chip and 46 degrees for the PCB.

One thing that annoys me is that even after trying to install nvidia's system tools or ntune..or whatever they call it.. I cannot adjust the fan speed. When I have the volume cranked up I would like the option to have the fan running at close to 100 percent .. but more than likely due to so many whinging decibel conscious people doing reviews for things, I can't get the fan to go anywhere near what is an appropriate speed... I have only once had the fan run close to its limits along with the smell of melting plastic .. it does make some noise when it does spin up... but I would prefer to hear some noise before the card gets up to 98 degrees or something ridiculous and starts melting into a pool of components.

Because I could not get nvidia's system tools to work with windows 7 .. I went about hacking and modding the actual card up.. first off I took the crappy sticker which was worrying loose off of the fan itself...I then removed the mounting bracket which is very easy.. like 5 screws and the four bolts near the monitor plugs.. then I snipped almost every grill wire off the grill.. leaving just one every so often ..I then ground back the little left over stubby bits, then I drilled a bunch of holes basically anywhere I could.. .....not surprisingly I at that moment found the true strength of the steel bracket... ummm not that strong really.... then I went shopping for a new card..just joking..lol ... the next step I took was removing the plastic cover and cutting a hole in it to suit a 80mm fan right above the main proccessing chip part of the heatsink.. I then attached a slim 15mm thick 80mm fan to the outside of the plastic case... upon reinstallation of the card...... I found out that the fan sits airtight and flush to the bottom of the pc case ... so that was less than worthwhile... I left it on there however as it may add air movement.. I also then just glued a few bits of memory foam to an old 80mm fan and sat it ontop of the card above the holes on the back of the pcb that go to underneath the squirrelcage fan.. looks as tho nvidia or gigabyte have a fan than is supposed to mount directly to those hole slots because the mounting points are positive/negative and pulse width modulated.. so there may be an optional fan in the future I presume..

anyway... temps have gone down by about 20 degrees.. which is good really .. and now I don't have to stuff around with more ntune or system tools installations..

eventually I feel as tho this card will be the better choice of what I had to choose from.. but only if drivers and so forth are optimized .. the future will tell.

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Atomic Magazine

Issue: 137 | June, 2012

Atomic is a magazine aimed squarely at computer enthusiasts, gamers, and serious PC upgraders.

Every month we bring you the latest reviews of new technology and PC components, in depth features on everything from overclocking to console hacking, and gaming previews and interviews.

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