Zotac nVidia GeForce GTX 480 DX11 Extreme Graphics Card Unboxing & First Look Linus Tech Tips
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2011-05-08
·
1,621 words · ~8 min read
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today I'll be unboxing a Zotac GeForce gtx480 card this is their highest end
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GeForce card at the moment they're actually going to be releasing in the
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upcoming weeks an amp version of this and it's going to actually have a triple
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slot cooler it's going to be clocked a little bit higher that's going to be
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pretty cool but for now this is what we have to work with and this is what I'm
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going to be using For an upcoming episode of NCIX Tech tips like I realize
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I'm a little late to the GTX 480 unboxing party but what are you going to
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do I needed it for something else anyway so I might as well unbox it so the first
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thing that you should notice about the Zotac box is it has a cool metallic guy
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on it okay that might not be the first thing the first thing you should notice
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about the Zotac box is this Deco right
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here the orange one there ex Zotac extended warranty so what that means is
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Zotac now offers lifetime warranties on
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all of their high-end GeForce products so you have to register the card after
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you get it but I like lifetime warranty can be worth its weight in gold if you
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actually end up having a problem later on down the line it also comes with the
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Zotac boost software suite so that includes bada boom for encoding videos
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vreal for enhancing videos I've never
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actually heard of this one but it's seems to be called super something super loiloscope
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or something like that apparently that's for editing videos I've never heard of
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that one and then you've also got Bit Defender internet security so most of
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these are cud app applications so that means that they can actually use the GPU
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rather than your CPU to do that video encoding and to enhance your video so
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that's a pretty neat feature it's compatible with all Cuda gpus so that
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means anything basically from an 8800 on up to the GTX 480 which is the latest
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and greatest it has 1.5 gigs of memory
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on board it supports physics as well as obviously Cuda which I was talking about
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before 384-bit memory interface it has HDMI on board and let's get around to
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the back so actually let's talk minimum system requirements for a minute and you
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need a PCI Express slot uh it doesn't need to be PCIe 2.0 but if you're really
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installing a card like this in a PCIe one motherboard you might want to
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re-evaluate your system upgrade you need one six pin and 1 18 pin PCI Express
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connector this is a power hungry card I've actually done a few videos already
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on the power consumption of uh of four GTX 480s but I haven't really done
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anything on a single card I don't think so uh maybe that's something that would
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be worth uh worth touching on let me see what else we have on here as well so
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it's direct X11 that's another thing that I should probably mention you've
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got full support for direct X11 including tessellation which is one of
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the big features that NVIDIA is touting about the gtx4 100 Series in general is
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that they have excellent tessellation performance so that's going to be one of
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the ways to improve image quality with direct X11 over what we had with direct
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X10 so as far as accessory package goes we've got two Molex 2 PCI Express
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connectors one of them is a six pin and I'm going to hold this here long enough
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for the camera to actually Focus cuz usually it doesn't bother to focus and
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then I've got one that is oh oh this is interesting okay so I have one that is
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two Molex to one PCIe 6 pin that I just showed you and then this one is two PCIe
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6 pin to One PCIe 8 Pin so if you had a
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power supply that was sort of like woefully underc connected so let's say
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you've got uh yeah g how would you do this so if
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you only had 2 PCI 6 pin I guess what
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you could do is you could take your 2 PCI 6 pin plug them into here plug that
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into the eight pin and then take two Molex connectors four pins and plug this
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into the sixth pin so then you would have power to your video card I have one
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dvi2 VGA adapter and rather than being a boring beige one it's like a clear
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plastic one big fan then I have one mini HDMI to HDMI adapter so if you're going
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to use HDMI and and you want to be able to plug your video card into an HDMI
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display then that will be useful because mini HDMI is not all that common yet
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these days okay inside here we have a
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bunch of pieces of paper so we'll have a
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look at these really briefly first of all it says before booting your PC make
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sure you plug in the power also please allow your graphics card to cool before
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touching it after operation these things get toasty we've got direct X11 and
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technology demos oh cool okay so this includes some technology demos from
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NVIDIA for directx11 very neat then we have a Zotac driver CD download the
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latest drivers off the NVIDIA website as if I haven't said that enough times the
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latest drivers are awesome they add a whole bunch of functionality and a whole
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bunch of performance for the GTX 400 series then we have the Zotac boost
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GeForce accelerated software thing there
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we go they're just telling us a little bit more about it then we have the Zotac
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extended warrant and quick installation guide so they talk a lot about the terms
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and conditions of the warranty I actually checked out Zotac T's and C's
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of the warranty before I started this video and they have one of the better
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ones out there because a lot of the time you know you might say see lifetime
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warranty asteris and then it turns out that lifetime warranty means like as
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long as that product's available or some other kinds of uh gotas but the Zotac
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one actually looks really good and that's going to be one of the subject of
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one of the tech tips videos that we're going to be doing around this card is actually how important warranty support
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is when you're dishing out a few hundred for a graphics card this is a user
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manual it has their metallic guy on it and then let's actually have a look at
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the card itself so this is a reference GTX 480 that means it is a standard
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length card it has its standard connector so we've got two DVI and One
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Mini HDMI although it only supports two displays out at a time up at the top
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we've got our two SLI connectors so this
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video card does support up to four-way SLI and if you check out my previous
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videos I've actually shown some demos with four-way SL running in The Cooler
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Master half X case up at the top you can see four of the five heat pipes that are
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used in this cooler the last one is actually I'm just going to get up and
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sort of show you the card a little better here the last one is actually down in there so you can see number five
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so these five heat pipes are basically all positioned directly over the GPU
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itself and then they're taking that heat and dispersing out into this ginormous
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cooler here this is actually a heat sink surface as well this is not a shiny
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plastic cover so it's very serious about
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uh dissipating heat from the GeForce gtx480 here we've got our 8 Pin PCIe as
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well as our six pin PCIe and speaking of heat dissipation
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here is our fan that'll be doing all of the heat dissipation it has access not
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only to air flow from the front but also from the back of the card through a
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couple of holes in the PCB we first saw this on NVIDIA's uh dual GPU cards but
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now it's actually made its way to their single GPU cards now that they run so
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toasty here is our PCIe 2.0 16x
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connector as well as what else do we even have here ah here more more vents
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No No actually that's kind of interesting H okay so at the back here
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this is actually just like no access to the fan whatsoever so all of the fans
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airf flow is going to be blowing out through the back of the card so unlike
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ati's 5870 the whole back slot here is
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dedicated to air being expelled from the case whereas with the 5870 you've
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actually got another DVI connector here and you've only got exhaust from half of
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it so that's one way to get better air flow is by not blocking off your case
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air from going outside anyway okay this is getting a little bit long thank you
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for checking out my unboxing of the Zotac GTX