There have been several reviews of NVidia’s new Fermi-based GTX480 cards, but not so many of the slightly lower-priced & performing GTX470 cards. HotHardware takes one of the new GTX470’s from PNY and runs it through it’s paces, and finds it a great card on its own but a bit difficult to justify in the face of competition from NVidia’s Radeon HD5850.
The PNY GeForce GTX 470 is a fairly well-rounded product. In terms of features, the GTX 470 is positioned well against AMD’s offerings. Both offer DX11 support, while NVIDIA also has support for CUDA, PhysX, and 3DVision, while AMD has Eyefinity. NVIDIA’s architecture also seems to be more forward-looking, as is evident by its stronger tessellation performance. Where the GeForce GTX 470 falters a bit, however, is in terms of price and power consumption. At $349, the GeForce GTX 470 is about 10% more expensive than the similarly performing Radeon HD 5850. Unfortunately for the GeForce, the Radeon HD 5850 also runs much cooler and quieter, and it consumes far less power as well. With that said, we found the GTX 470’s acoustic profile to be much more tolerable than the higher-end GTX 480 and we would have no problem running one of these cards in our personal systems–the GTX 470 isn’t as quiet (relatively speaking) as a Radeon HD 5850, but it’s not very loud either.
