Today we will be talking about Point of View's GeForce GTX 470, a card that by now certainly needs no introduction. Both these GeForce GTX 470 and GeForce GTX 480 are aimed at high-end market and are the Radeon HD 5800 series direct competitors. NVIDIA launched their GeForce GTX 400 series more than a month ago, and the cards are based on the largest and fastest Fermi graphics core. We expected the GeForce GTX 480 to get the full version of the GF100 but NVIDIA thought differently and it ended up with one disabled streaming multiprocessor. Going downstream to the GeForce GTX 470, this card has two disabled and 448 stream processors in total. And what happened to the full version? - FudZilla

Point of View GeForce GTX 470 (GF100) Card Preview

In order to make the performance difference evident, the usual practice is to lower operating clocks. This is the case with the GeForce GTX 470 where the chipset runs at 607MHz only. The GF100 is a fast and powerful graphics processor, but cooling it on these GeForce GTX 400 cards has proven to be quite tricky. So NVIDIA uses dual slot cooling on both cards and while it does get the job done, both get pretty loud. The Point of View GeForce GTX 470 is no different from the reference, except for the stickers on the fan and cooler. To transfer the heat from the core to the heatsink, the cooler uses five heatpipes which is very common.

When we are going for overclocking that always requires some kind of sacrifice towards thermals, noise or both. We had to push the fan to maximum rotation, but the fan was unbearably loud. We didn't meddle with voltages but managed to push the core to 700MHz. Truth be told, we expected more. We managed to hit 740MHz, but the graphics card didn't run stable in all the different benchmarks. Overclocking the memory on these GeForce GTX 400 cards is a bit tough, and we only managed to reach 3520MHz. The Point of View GeForce GTX 470 card is without a doubt an excellent graphics card and it will set you back about $399.

This is the first more affordable NVIDIA based DirectX 11 ready gaming card. This GeForce GTX 470 runs at reference clocks and comes with reference cooling which is quiet in desktop operation, but can get rather loud during gaming. The AMD Radeon HD 5870 on the other hand is priced some $35 higher, and while our testing does prove it's slightly faster, the GeForce GTX 470 often stages a comeback and wins. Basically it is often all down to particular titles and user preferences. This has been especially true in anti-aliasing, but it does fare well in DirectX 11 performance as well and offers PhysX as extra feature.

Now choosing between these two is not as straightforward as it used to be. They are very closely matched both in terms of performance and price, so you won't go wrong with either of them. The Radeon HD 5870 is somewhat cooler and needs less juice, while these GeForce GTX 470 supports several interesting technology and it is a bit more future proof, hence we will give it a slight advantage over the good old Radeon HD 5870 graphics card.