480 temps great on air with nice oc.

[turdhat]

My card has not hit above 90c with fan forced at 70% (which isnt loud to me at all) running extreme burn on furmark. Keep in mind my core is running at 806 (default 701), shader at 1612 (Default 1400) and to my surprise is rock solid.

The memory doesnt like being pushed very far however. At 970 (default 925) Heaven Dx11 bench would hard lock and throw crap all over the screen. Mem at 945 + 806core and 1612 shader =rock solid and very, very fast.

The card rocks, the heat is a non issue and it overclocks f&^king awesome with no effort. My case is a wind tunnel with great airflow. Ambient temps on air coming in to the case are about 73.5f at the moment.

Next step, I7 at at least 4.0ghz. Dont know for sure if that q6600 in sig is holding me back too much.

[brunner]

It's a bit surprising that that ram overclocked so little. Isn't the 480 already setting the memory speed at lower than it's rated for?

Yeah, that Q6600 is holding you back but it also depends on what games you're playing. When I switched to a I7 from a Q6600 that was similarly clocked as yours, I noticed that the framerate in many newer games became more stable. That was just with a pair of 280 GTXes so you should see even bigger results with a 480.

[Toss3]

Not really surprised at it being a good overclocker as it was clearly downclocked in order to draw less than 300w.
Eagerly looking forward to the refresh of these cards! The GTX 480 packs one hell of a punch when overclocked.

[Arioch]

I just upgraded my PC from a QX6700@3.3Ghz to a I7 930@3.5Ghz. I had my 2 480GTX cards in my old system for a couple days and I can tell you the new CPU did a lot for my minimum frame rates. I use 3D Vision and that really brings down performance. In games like Metro 2033 and Just Cause 2 I was having to turning off or drop down some settings to keep my minimum frame rates from impacting gameplay but now I can pretty much crank up everything to maximum.

[turdhat]

Originally Posted by brunner

It's a bit surprising that that ram overclocked so little. Isn't the 480 already setting the memory speed at lower than it's rated for?

Yeah, that Q6600 is holding you back but it also depends on what games you're playing. When I switched to a I7 from a Q6600 that was similarly clocked as yours, I noticed that the framerate in many newer games became more stable. That was just with a pair of 280 GTXes so you should see even bigger results with a 480.

I have been hearing that if you have a q6600 at at least 3.6 that an I7 isnt going to net you a whole lot unless you go SLI. Then it is a must. Anyone else advise on this ?

Come to think of it, if my cpu was a bottleneck then I wouldnt see improvments across the board on GPU overclocking right ? I am seeing performance improvments from everything that I have tried when compared to stock clocks.

Dirt 2
Boarderlands
Fear 1
FLuidmark
Furmark
Heaven bench went from 49 to 54fps from the clock bump default dx11 settings at 1080p

Hmm, how is the noise on your card?

[turdhat]

Well I guess it is a little loud if you are right up on it but that is down to personal opinion. I dont hear it because I have a strange pc setup with everything intergrated in to my home theater and use wireless mouse +keyboard from couch. I sit at a desk all day and be damned if I going to do it when I want to relax with a game !

The pc is behind the black curtain which is a small storage area. See the dvd drive on top of the right speaker ?

http://s766.photobucket.com/albums/xx302/turdhat/

[brunner]

Originally Posted by turdhat

I have been hearing that if you have a q6600 at at least 3.6 that an I7 isnt going to net you a whole lot unless you go SLI. Then it is a must. Anyone else advise on this ?

Come to think of it, if my cpu was a bottleneck then I wouldnt see improvments across the board on GPU overclocking right ? I am seeing performance improvments from everything that I have tried when compared to stock clocks.

Not true. If you're most playing console ports like Resident Evil or Batman:AA, then yeah you won't see much difference because console games tend not to be very CPU intensive. However, for games like World in Conflict, Farcry 2 and Crysis, there's a big difference. I don't think that synthetic CPU benchmarks really show the edge that I7 has over the Q6600. On paper, their performances aren't that far off from each other at the same clock speed but in gaming, it's very apparent. I think that's just due to the X58 being a much better platform overall than anything the Q6600 runs on.

[Slytat]

Originally Posted by brunner

Not true. If you're most playing console ports like Resident Evil or Batman:AA, then yeah you won't see much difference because console games tend not to be very CPU intensive. However, for games like World in Conflict, Farcry 2 and Crysis, there's a big difference. I don't think that synthetic CPU benchmarks really show the edge that I7 has over the Q6600. On paper, their performances aren't that far off from each other at the same clock speed but in gaming, it's very apparent. I think that's just due to the X58 being a much better platform overall than anything the Q6600 runs on.

Further to that, many RTS will benefit heavily from i7's as well.

[sancheuz]

How has your card not hit 90 degrees? My single 480 when playing crysis hits 95 with my fan at 85 percent. How long did you run test? What is your room temp?

[brunner]

Originally Posted by sancheuz

How has your card not hit 90 degrees? My single 480 when playing crysis hits 95 with my fan at 85 percent. How long did you run test? What is your room temp?

Maybe you have to reapply the thermal compound on your GPU? Some people are reporting in forums that they have really messily applied TIM on their 400 GPUS which are causing heat problems.

[Galvin]

I'd like someone to do some tests showing the difference in temps on a 480 stock cooler. But changing the thermal compound to the standard paste that overclockers use. And was it just the gpu part the paste is applied to or did they change the paste for the memory chips and VRM's too?