480M Benchmarks

Provided by Toms Hardware:
GeForce GTX 480M: AVADirect?s W880CU Is Packing The Heat : Out With The Old, In With The New

Seems like a decent improvement over the Mobility 5870

 

Great read!
It looks very good

 

u beat me to it! tomshardware's benchmarks reported on average about 19% improvement over MR5870, which is quite good. but 2-3X the price of MR5870 without doubling the performance?...

 

I only saw a gain in 2 games, the rest were nearly dead even at resolutions that matter (1080p). Not impressive for it's enormous price tag.

P.S. Tom's Hardware blows..wait for a better website like notebookcheck to do a review.

 

Before I'm convinced that the 480M is even worth considering at any point over a 5870, I want to see a direct comparison of performance gain against cost and power increase.

It's already all over for nVidia unless someone gets two of those in SLi, which is a colossal task considering the massive power consumption and heat production. And then it'd have to beat out the 5870 crossfire by a significant margin to make it worth the extra cost, power consumption, and heat production.

I really can't see it happening, quite frankly.

 

Clevo X7200 GTX 480M SLI ... 17.3" laptop with extraordinary performance powered by Intel Core i7 processor and Dual nVIDIA GeForce GTX 480M (Fermi) techno ...

it was up onto clevo's site 2 days ago but it seem they are having an issue with thier web server

but that's the fact that it has two gtx 480 that is great what reall is is that with the power to run those that laptop could have a 3way 5870 CFX setup

 

Since price-wise it's in the range of crossfire 5870s, it would make sense to see the comparison with those too.

 

Quoted for truth!

Nice benches for a single card though

 

I think that the 480m is an impressive piece of hardware for what it is. The only problem that I see despite the heat and power requirements are price. I dont think heat and power is THAT big a deal I don't think considering that these desktop replacements and always going to have to be plugged in all the time because of the complete crap battery life and the heat from the 480m is not THAT bad when it has good cooling.

The ONLY downfall that I see from the 480m is PRICE. Especially when compared to the 5870 in the performance to price ratio...I mean, Id rather have 15% less gaming capability with the MR5870 (which is still way fast enough for anything out there) over the 480m which costs what...3x more? Its average going rate in a laptop that can support them is like $900...which is COMPLETELY ridiculous and I dont see the justifications in that cost...I mean, $900 is enough for TWO desktop GTX480's...so I dont see how a downclocked single GPU desktop 465 can even begin to cost the same as a desktop GTX480...let alone two of them...

 

Kinda interesting how the reviewer always moved the 480M to the top of the charts, even on benchmarks where it lost to the 5870M. I'm with joker, this wasn't a very good review at all.

 

Notebook check is less then stellar as well. Everything gets the same score. around 80%. No matter how awesome they think it is or how crappy 80% is what it gets.

 

Woah, the 480m performance is worse than I thought. For the current price, the CF HD5870 is the current best solution....

Oh well, i'll wait a bit before upgrading.

 

Of course the CF HD5870 is the best now since we haven´t seen any GTX 480M SLI benchmarks yet.

 

Oh dear, you almost need a tom's hardware warning as much as you need a FUDD warning. In fact Tom's have been doing it longer.

One thing that made me chuckle was saying that Nvidia is justified calling it a 480M because ATI called their card the 5870. When of course it was Nvidia who started that trick

 

The benchmark posted by Tom's Hardware are quite detailed and only comfort what everyone was thinking:

Nvidia's 480M is useless... Sure it is a somewhat more powerful card on some games... (Only 3 where I saw an improvement) but it has a heat envelope too high for most notebooks.

I think the architecture needs some great revisions before Nvidia can truly compete.

 

I agree. I was looking at upcoming laptops that have 480M sli, and I thought, nice portable grill.

 

The 480m vs 5870m comparison can be compared to many other items out there.

Yes the 480m can do better on some games, but as a trade off you paying a lot more, it produces more heat, and drains more power, this will lead to a compromised system.

As for what I meant when I said it can be compared to other items. Im thinking other electronics like speakers, fans, car motors, lots of things where you can increase the cost by a substantial amount, and the size of that item and get an increase of performance, but in general in those ares most people consider the smaller item to be the best because of its overall value.

I know that sounds starange, I am half asleep right now. So I'll expalin a bit more whats in my head. Say speakers for example. You can have your small computer speakers on your desk that you paid $100 for and they totally rock and do what you need them to do.

Your friend has a full blown home theater system, yeah it beats your computer speakers but it cost him 8x more and it takes up his whole room instead of just his desk.

The comparison is the cost directly, the 480m cost more than the 5870m. The next comparison is the size (compromises) the home theater takes up the whole room, uses more energy. Just like the 480m will use more energy and due to its high heat generated it will take up more room in a laptop for a proper cooling system or even result in a larger laptop in itself.

When you break it down all the way to the basics a better performance card like the 480m does not equal a better card once you weigh out the things you must trade for the minor performance increase.

That said its new, and not really in the hands of users yet. We need more reviews and more opinions before we can squarely conclude this opinion.

 

We have plenty of opinions around here, the general consensus is that only hardcore NV enthusiasts will be buying it, otherwise you'll buy a 5870 XF for less money We do need more hands-on reviews though, but the problem that's always brought up is the legitimacy or consistency of the reviewer site and/or their setups. We generally trust user reviews here (hellcry did a good job comparing the 2) but with the price so high not many will bite and do comparisons for us.

 

Well, it's a single GPU card that will fit in a single GPU notebook, so comparing it with dual GPU isn't really apple to apple.

Fact is, there is a performance increase, in 2 games yes, but they only tested like what, 3 games? Also, as tested in the Clevo forums, the furmark score is only around 72C to 80C, lower than the average 5870MR temp due to the low voltage, no where near a "portable grill" level.

The price is a big con, but if you are enthusiast willing to chuck out the money for the fastest card then so be it, the performance increase will never be proportionate to the price paid as with everything in life. An average sennheiser IEM cost probably less than $50, but my westone UM2 that's like $250+ costing 5 times won't sound 5 times better. It's the law of diminishing returns.

However, personally I won't even consider the 480M though, I'm not that much of an enthusiast nor do I have that much spare money lying around.

 

We're in agreement here; the fact that you can actually have a dual card setup for cheaper than a single card is appalling though, and I cited XF because "true" enthusiasts really don't care if it is single or dual card, they only want pure performance. You'd need to be a brand-loyal deep-pocket enthusiast to buy a 480, it makes a lot of people question who exactly nv is marketing this to. Wait, I just said who

I'd be more interested in the 460m benches, because that is rumored to be a more reasonable cost, but also weaker than the 5870...

 

There's still a large size and weight difference for notebooks that support single and dual GPUs.
Moreover, there are enthusiasts who simply wants a single GPU because of the multitudes of problems with dual GPUs, such as not being able to make use of 2nd GPU in windowed games, more driver headache etc.

There's the 480M SLI for dual GPU enthusiasts though.

 

Well the issue really is, we know we pay a premium for the best. Thats a given.

What's really infuriating is Nvidia is charging a $600 premium for its "19%" gain. This is not reasonable, not practical and not something consumers should support. When you actually look at the wide range of 5870 and 480 benchmarks through all of the sources, on closer inspection the ~20% gain is from lower resolutions.

Seriously if there is a laptop that has a 480, its gonna have a 1900x1080 screen, who is gonna game at the 1280 resolutions that the 480 clearly wins at, but starts to even with the 5870 when it hits 1200p resolution. Nvidia should take a lesson from ATI and charge at the most $100 more for 20% gains.

 

Can you actually get 480M SLI yet? Can any case out there take 200W of graphics + however much CPU?

 

Right now the X7200 by Clevo is the only machine that is coming with 480 SLI and using a Desktop CPU ...

You will have to tow around a small nuclear reactor to power it but it almost seems worth it ...

 

Something is seriously wrong with this thing. How does it only perform marginally better than a 285m while having 2.5x times the shaders? This thing should be almost twice as fast as the 285 and 5870. Somethings not right.

 

The clocks are hideously slow? I mean, I think shader clocks are around half at 800mhz compared to 1500 of the GTX 285M. Core clocks are lower too, at 400mhz range instead of the near 600mhz speed of the 285m.

Who knows. To me it speaks loud of how inefficient the new fermi shaders are compared to their old architecture, but I could be plain wrong, maybe they just don't scale as well as AMD's solution with stream processors.

At any rate, I was expecting a 50% average increase from the GTX285m, considering the huge ammount of shaders it has... but I was quite disappointed. All a mystery to me.

 

i didn't get that.

lol

but really speaking, 480M isn't worth the pricetag and cost and really we can't depend on the reviews.. we need ppl to actually have it and does anyone here actually have it?

 

Who is crazy enough to buy it when a 5870m is $600 less. Most games you see a 6 fps difference if that. That's $100 per frame, lol.

 

the price of the 480m is a joke. have to be mentally ill to buy it over a 5870

 

Almost. Btw, desktop CPU + 480 sli rofl.

 

Seems like there is only 5870 users that totally disses the GTX 480m, I wonder why. For me it sounds like you try to defend your purchase and try to get other users to not buy the GTX 480m. Just my personal thought though.

 

I think all anyone is saying, is that the average improvement at 1920x1080 isn't worth the price to most people. If you want the best, and don't care about price, then this is what you want.

 

No need to defend a logical purchase - yes, it will be 'obsolete' soon enough and it isn't the newest kid in town any more, but if it still competes neck&neck with the competition at roughly 40% of the cost, why not? I think a lot of people are just venting frustration at nvidia for being so stupid about the cost and raising the thermal/power requirements bar. It's a step backwards for us.

 

And it seems like only Nvidia owners defend it.

 

I haven´t seen anyone defend the 480m GTX yet, only dissing so far. Why would anyone be frustrated with Nvidia, they haven´t rebranded a G92 this time, but released a Fermi GPU. I think this should please people, but apparently not.

Now I am awaiting some real benchmarks from users when they get the 480m GTX.

 

I honestly couldn't care less whether the graphic card says ATI or nVidia. Same crap. If you think people are dissing nVidia because we "love" ATI, you haven't really been reading carefully.

The power brick on m17x-r2 is already the size of a little netbook... I wonder how will it look on a laptop with 480SLI

 

I already told you why:

It would be like a car company deciding that they can no longer make a semi-efficient 6 cylinder engine pump out 250HP, so instead they make a 12 cyl that puts out 275HP, and the heck with the cost/size/efficiency of it. A literal step backwards.

What makes it worse is that now it will be unofficially "ok" for both ati and nv to release future cards with ridiculous power requirements, when we were doing fine hovering at 50-75w for quite some time.

 

Ahhhh, the good old days, when battery life on a gaming laptop almost lasted an hour.

 

Just purchased the gtx480m card from sager for my 9280 (D900F). My laptop is in for a motherboard replacement so I decided to get the 480m installed. I have the gtx280m now and would of liked to goto the 5870 mobility but there is no option for it.

Yes I have seen HellCry's mod and was looking into it but after you buy the card and the heatsink I was still looking at $550+, and modding time etc...

So I bought the gtx480 for wait for it $855 that is installed with new heatsink, new power brick etc... to make my 9280 compatible for the gtx480m.

 

Here is an AnandTech review of the same Clevo. I think 19% over the 5870 is too optimistic an improvement -- it's usually better by 10-20%, but there are some games for which the 480M is actually even or negligibly worse. In any case, there is no way the improvement is great enough to justify the price -- Nvidia is definitely charging a monstrous premium for those who absolutely must have the "best".

 

I would like to see some benchmarks with unofficial drivers, Anandtech surely uses official mobile drivers. But if they could use any of the desktop drivers it would be interesting to see if the performance goes up a bit. I personally always use the desktop drivers.

 

This kinda reminds me of the whole 9800M GTX vs 3870 (or even 9800M GTX vs 8800M GTX/9800M GT) ordeal a while back. In this case, most of the dissing/frustration stems from the pricing of the card relative to how it performs. Back then, the 9800M GTX was undoubtedly the best card out there. However, it was priced $200+ Above an 8800M GTX/9800M GT and around $350 above the 3870 and performed significantly well over those cards only in certain cases.

Now, it seems to look worse than it was before. Like the 9800M GTX, the GTX 480M performs significantly better in certain situations (and most of those situations aren't even playable), but performs pretty much evenly in most other situations to the 5870M. Yet you can get a 5870M for $350 and a GTX 480M can be had for $940 as long as you don't buy it pre-installed. So now it's a $600 difference between the GTX 480M and the next best card out there. And it'd be a tough one to argue that better tesselation, an extra 1gb of video memory (You would need SLi/XF to make use of anything more of 1gb of VRAM btw), CUDA and PhysX is worth $600, or even 400 if you want to factor in the newness of the card.

Now if the GTX 480M was $500, it would be a different story to the point where most wouldn't even care too much about its power draw.

 

Now most people would probably buy the whole laptop including the 480m GTX. Yes buying just the GPU is expensive, just look at the 9800m GTX SLI for M1730 on Ebay, from $500 and up.

 

I bought the w870cu because I though I could eventually upgrade the gpu. Now that the GTX480m is not compatible with it, I guess I'm not that disappointed.

 

There's still the next gen ati chips coming, and the middle level of whatever comes after the 480m.

 

I wouldn't be. I'm the guy that wrote the AnandTech review and have the W880CU in my hot little hands right now (sending it back to the good folks at AVADirect tomorrow).

The 480M is not good hardware. Thrice the shaders for about a 20% performance gain on the horribly-named GTX 285M, and it makes you wonder that if Nvidia had the brass to try and shoehorn a Fermi into a notebook why they didn't try to get GT200b in. At least THAT might've had halfway decent clock speeds.

Honestly, though, top-end mobile graphics have been pretty dismal for a while now. Without competition it stagnates. I reviewed a GTX 285M and the Mobility Radeon HD 5870 and was about as impressed with either of those, but at least you can get the 5870 for a reasonable price these days. Gaming notebooks, at least in today's market, are honestly a fool's errand. Even the performance class cards have completely stalled out (5650 is barely better than a 4650, and the GT 330M is awful).

This is a wait and see situation; hopefully the next few months will produce competitive DX11-class hardware.

 

the core is so huge

 

NVDIA fanboys

Fanatic Fanboy! Hope ur Sager NP9280 doesn't burn..

eek indeed... the card is just too big and too much power guzzler..

 

Well Sean you are an ATI fanboy, but I won´t get so low to throw fanboy here and there ok

I think for laptop users current situation is pretty good, you don´t have to upgrade as often as you had to do earlier since most PC games comes from the consoles today and those games barely sets any high bar for performance and graphics. This is why users with 5870, GTX 480M even 8800m GTX users along with 9800m GTX and so on is set for a good while.

I mean I bought my XPS M1730 for over 2 years ago and there is no game even today I can´t run at 1920x1200 so it definitely have stagnated which is good.

 

None of that is a good thing at all. It means that little progress is being made, the PC is not being used anywhere near to its full potential and all we are getting is crappy half done Console ports. If anything, maybe the mobile GPU manufacturers might have more of a reason to do more research and development to improve on their GPU's if they couldn't run current titles so well.