NVIDIA GeForce GTX 480 Review

Core Temperature & Acoustics

For all temperature testing, the cards were placed on an open test bench with a single 120mm 1200RPM fan placed ~8” away from the heatsink. The ambient temperature was kept at a constant 22°C (+/- 0.5°C). If the ambient temperatures rose above 23°C at any time throughout the test, all benchmarking was stopped. For this test we use the 3DMark Batch Size test at it highest triangle count with 4xAA and 16xAF enabled and looped it for one hour to determine the peak load temperature as measured by GPU-Z.

For Idle tests, we let the system idle at the Vista desktop for 15 minutes and recorded the peak temperature.


Say it with me: ninety five degrees. We know the chip is supposedly built to run at these temperatures throughout its life without impacting upon its expected longevity but seeing these temperatures for any length of time on a processor is shocking to say the least. Interestingly enough, the fan stays relatively quiet (subjectively approaching that of the HD 5970) throughout this massive increase in temperatures.

In addition, idle temperatures are actually quite good and fly in the face of previous rumours. In our tests, thermal throttling usually set in at around 105°C on the GF100 cards while complete thermal shutdown happens around 112-125°C. Thankfully, temperatures never got past the 95°C mark even after hours of benchmarking.

System Power Consumption

For this test we hooked up our power supply to a UPM power meter that will log the power consumption of the whole system twice every second. In order to stress the GPU as much as possible we once again use the Batch Render test in 3DMark06 and let it run for 30 minutes to determine the peak power consumption while letting the card sit at a stable Windows desktop for 30 minutes to determine the peak idle power consumption. We have also included several other tests as well.

Please note that after extensive testing, we have found that simply plugging in a power meter to a wall outlet or UPS will NOT give you accurate power consumption numbers due to slight changes in the input voltage. Thus we use a Tripp-Lite 1800W line conditioner between the 120V outlet and the power meter.


There is simply no denying the fact that the GTX 480 is one power hungry card. Idle power consumption isn’t all that bad when compared to the previous generation of NVIDIA cards but it pales in comparison to the efficiency achieved by the HD 5800 series. Unfortunately, for the performance it gives the GTX 480 is certainly not the best performance per watt card out there.