today I'll be unboxing a Zotac GeForce gtx480 card this is their highest end
GeForce card at the moment they're actually going to be releasing in the
upcoming weeks an amp version of this and it's going to actually have a triple
slot cooler it's going to be clocked a little bit higher that's going to be
pretty cool but for now this is what we have to work with and this is what I'm
going to be using For an upcoming episode of NCIX Tech tips like I realize
I'm a little late to the GTX 480 unboxing party but what are you going to
do I needed it for something else anyway so I might as well unbox it so the first
thing that you should notice about the Zotac box is it has a cool metallic guy
on it okay that might not be the first thing the first thing you should notice
about the Zotac box is this Deco right
here the orange one there ex Zotac extended warranty so what that means is
Zotac now offers lifetime warranties on
all of their high-end GeForce products so you have to register the card after
you get it but I like lifetime warranty can be worth its weight in gold if you
actually end up having a problem later on down the line it also comes with the
Zotac boost software suite so that includes bada boom for encoding videos
vreal for enhancing videos I've never
actually heard of this one but it's seems to be called super something super loiloscope
or something like that apparently that's for editing videos I've never heard of
that one and then you've also got Bit Defender internet security so most of
these are cud app applications so that means that they can actually use the GPU
rather than your CPU to do that video encoding and to enhance your video so
that's a pretty neat feature it's compatible with all Cuda gpus so that
means anything basically from an 8800 on up to the GTX 480 which is the latest
and greatest it has 1.5 gigs of memory
on board it supports physics as well as obviously Cuda which I was talking about
before 384-bit memory interface it has HDMI on board and let's get around to
the back so actually let's talk minimum system requirements for a minute and you
need a PCI Express slot uh it doesn't need to be PCIe 2.0 but if you're really
installing a card like this in a PCIe one motherboard you might want to
re-evaluate your system upgrade you need one six pin and 1 18 pin PCI Express
connector this is a power hungry card I've actually done a few videos already
on the power consumption of uh of four GTX 480s but I haven't really done
anything on a single card I don't think so uh maybe that's something that would
be worth uh worth touching on let me see what else we have on here as well so
it's direct X11 that's another thing that I should probably mention you've
got full support for direct X11 including tessellation which is one of
the big features that NVIDIA is touting about the gtx4 100 Series in general is
that they have excellent tessellation performance so that's going to be one of
the ways to improve image quality with direct X11 over what we had with direct
X10 so as far as accessory package goes we've got two Molex 2 PCI Express
connectors one of them is a six pin and I'm going to hold this here long enough
for the camera to actually Focus cuz usually it doesn't bother to focus and
then I've got one that is oh oh this is interesting okay so I have one that is
two Molex to one PCIe 6 pin that I just showed you and then this one is two PCIe
6 pin to One PCIe 8 Pin so if you had a
power supply that was sort of like woefully underc connected so let's say
you've got uh yeah g how would you do this so if
you only had 2 PCI 6 pin I guess what
you could do is you could take your 2 PCI 6 pin plug them into here plug that
into the eight pin and then take two Molex connectors four pins and plug this
into the sixth pin so then you would have power to your video card I have one
dvi2 VGA adapter and rather than being a boring beige one it's like a clear
plastic one big fan then I have one mini HDMI to HDMI adapter so if you're going
to use HDMI and and you want to be able to plug your video card into an HDMI
display then that will be useful because mini HDMI is not all that common yet
these days okay inside here we have a
bunch of pieces of paper so we'll have a
look at these really briefly first of all it says before booting your PC make
sure you plug in the power also please allow your graphics card to cool before
touching it after operation these things get toasty we've got direct X11 and
technology demos oh cool okay so this includes some technology demos from
NVIDIA for directx11 very neat then we have a Zotac driver CD download the
latest drivers off the NVIDIA website as if I haven't said that enough times the
latest drivers are awesome they add a whole bunch of functionality and a whole
bunch of performance for the GTX 400 series then we have the Zotac boost
GeForce accelerated software thing there
we go they're just telling us a little bit more about it then we have the Zotac
extended warrant and quick installation guide so they talk a lot about the terms
and conditions of the warranty I actually checked out Zotac T's and C's
of the warranty before I started this video and they have one of the better
ones out there because a lot of the time you know you might say see lifetime
warranty asteris and then it turns out that lifetime warranty means like as
long as that product's available or some other kinds of uh gotas but the Zotac
one actually looks really good and that's going to be one of the subject of
one of the tech tips videos that we're going to be doing around this card is actually how important warranty support
is when you're dishing out a few hundred for a graphics card this is a user
manual it has their metallic guy on it and then let's actually have a look at
the card itself so this is a reference GTX 480 that means it is a standard
length card it has its standard connector so we've got two DVI and One
Mini HDMI although it only supports two displays out at a time up at the top
we've got our two SLI connectors so this
video card does support up to four-way SLI and if you check out my previous
videos I've actually shown some demos with four-way SL running in The Cooler
Master half X case up at the top you can see four of the five heat pipes that are
used in this cooler the last one is actually I'm just going to get up and
sort of show you the card a little better here the last one is actually down in there so you can see number five
so these five heat pipes are basically all positioned directly over the GPU
itself and then they're taking that heat and dispersing out into this ginormous
cooler here this is actually a heat sink surface as well this is not a shiny
plastic cover so it's very serious about
uh dissipating heat from the GeForce gtx480 here we've got our 8 Pin PCIe as
well as our six pin PCIe and speaking of heat dissipation
here is our fan that'll be doing all of the heat dissipation it has access not
only to air flow from the front but also from the back of the card through a
couple of holes in the PCB we first saw this on NVIDIA's uh dual GPU cards but
now it's actually made its way to their single GPU cards now that they run so
toasty here is our PCIe 2.0 16x
connector as well as what else do we even have here ah here more more vents
No No actually that's kind of interesting H okay so at the back here
this is actually just like no access to the fan whatsoever so all of the fans
airf flow is going to be blowing out through the back of the card so unlike
ati's 5870 the whole back slot here is
dedicated to air being expelled from the case whereas with the 5870 you've
actually got another DVI connector here and you've only got exhaust from half of
it so that's one way to get better air flow is by not blocking off your case
air from going outside anyway okay this is getting a little bit long thank you
for checking out my unboxing of the Zotac GTX