Legit Reviews

ASUS GeForce GTX 470 ENGTX470 Graphics Card Review

The ASUS GeForce GTX 470 graphics card (ENGTX470) has 448 CUDA cores operating at a 607MHz core clock speed, 1280MB of GDDR5 memory, and a 320-bit memory interface. Will this be enough to compete with the ATI Radeon HD 5850 graphics cards series in the $350 price range? Read on to figure out how the ENGTX470 does when we put it to the test!

The ASUS GeForce ENGTX470 graphics card proved to be a slightly better performing graphics card than the reference designed Radeon HD 5850 graphics card that we tested it against. When compared to the factory overclocked Sapphire Radeon HD 5850 Toxic Edition, the ASUS GeForce GTX 470 traded blows in a benchmark battle too close to call. Since a Radeon HD 5850 can be purchased for $299.99 shipped without rebates, the ASUS GeForce GTX 470, priced at $349.99 plus $8 shipping has it work cut out for it, however, NVIDIA has always had a loyal customer base.

Article Title: ASUS GeForce GTX 470 ENGTX470 Graphics Card Review
Article URL: http://www.legitreviews.com/article/1287/1/
Pricing At Time of Print: $349 plus shipping

so it seems that anyone who DOESN'T fold will go for the 5850 as the 470 is too close in performance across the board for $50 more(not to mention power consumption)

On the overclocking page it says "The first is that you are rather limited by clock frequencies as the Vcore setting in SmartDoctor only goes up to 707MHz. ". What? Do you mean the core setting and not Vcore?

Also have you tried overclocking using MSI AfterBurner? I'd definitely love to see a follow up review to this.

skier wrote:so it seems that anyone who DOESN'T fold will go for the 5850 as the 470 is too close in performance across the board for $50 more(not to mention power consumption)

I think I'd still go for the ATI 5850 instead of the GTX 470. Maybe as the drivers get better the performance of the GTX 470 would be better.

I'd rather go ATi and I've used nothing but nVidia products in my main machine for the last 5 years (when did the 9800 Pro come out? Omega drivers all the way.). To me the chip is flawed. The yields at the fab suck, the power consumption sucks (bud da cha) and the heat dissipation is horrendous. If I were to run this in my room with 12 foot ceilings and central air I better buy a window unit AC to keep from sweating to death. I see this revision of the chip similar to the whole FX 5800 Ultra fiasco. It was less than 6 months after the 5800 Ultra was released they had the FX 5900 Ultra then eventually the 5950.

geokilla wrote:On the overclocking page it says "The first is that you are rather limited by clock frequencies as the Vcore setting in SmartDoctor only goes up to 707MHz. ". What? Do you mean the core setting and not Vcore?

Also have you tried overclocking using MSI AfterBurner? I'd definitely love to see a follow up review to this.

skier wrote:so it seems that anyone who DOESN'T fold will go for the 5850 as the 470 is too close in performance across the board for $50 more(not to mention power consumption)

I think I'd still go for the ATI 5850 instead of the GTX 470. Maybe as the drivers get better the performance of the GTX 470 would be better.

The first thing is that you are rather limited by clock frequencies as the Vcore setting in SmartDoctor only goes up to 707MHz.

Sorry about that! I fixed that typo!

As for using MSI AfterBurner or EVGA Precision... I didn't bother for two reasons... One is was an ASUS review and two due to time limitations... LR has over 40 products in to review right now and with Computex next month we have really no time to do anything... We've done daily reviews for over 3 weeks now and the hardware is coming in faster than we can get it out. By using just SmartDoctor and showing that it is limiting and sucks, it is my sincere hope that ASUS updates it and becomes competitive with other utilities on the market today.

Apoptosis wrote:

geokilla wrote:On the overclocking page it says "The first is that you are rather limited by clock frequencies as the Vcore setting in SmartDoctor only goes up to 707MHz. ". What? Do you mean the core setting and not Vcore?

Also have you tried overclocking using MSI AfterBurner? I'd definitely love to see a follow up review to this.

skier wrote:so it seems that anyone who DOESN'T fold will go for the 5850 as the 470 is too close in performance across the board for $50 more(not to mention power consumption)

I think I'd still go for the ATI 5850 instead of the GTX 470. Maybe as the drivers get better the performance of the GTX 470 would be better.

The first thing is that you are rather limited by clock frequencies as the Vcore setting in SmartDoctor only goes up to 707MHz.

Sorry about that! I fixed that typo!

As for using MSI AfterBurner or EVGA Precision... I didn't bother for two reasons... One is was an ASUS review and two due to time limitations... LR has over 40 products in to review right now and with Computex next month we have really no time to do anything... We've done daily reviews for over 3 weeks now and the hardware is coming in faster than we can get it out. By using just SmartDoctor and showing that it is limiting and sucks, it is my sincere hope that ASUS updates it and becomes competitive with other utilities on the market today.

I'm sure members here will be more than happy to relieve the Legit Reviews team with some of that hardware that needs to be reviewed

You have any other GTX 4x0 or HD 5xx0 cards that you need reviewed send them my way and I'll write you up a review.

so the 470 performs exactly like the 5850. Literally 1 FPS difference in some cases. All this for $50 more, and nearly half a year later than the competition? Nvidia better get its act together.

DeusEx wrote:so the 470 performs exactly like the 5850. Literally 1 FPS difference in some cases. All this for $50 more, and nearly half a year later than the competition? Nvidia better get its act together.

Well currently, yes. However I don't think the drivers for their GTX 4X0 cards are fully optimized yet. We should see some nice performance increase once they are.

'"Will this be enough to compete with the ATI Radeon HD 5850 graphics cards series in the $350 price range? "

This is a misleading title. Why say that and later state the 5850 can in fact be found at 299.00$, or 15% lower price? That's a considerable difference! From that logic, I could have easily replaced "5850" by "5870" in that title, which is "only" 50.00$ more expensive than the 470 and destroys it in every benchmark...

Either way, the point is the 470 is simply an inviable product, period. The price/power/heat/noise to performance ratio is simply not there. Save 50.00$, and more on your electric bill, and go for 5850 instated for 95% of the performance once overclocked. Later, put 2 X 5850 together and go for 480's throat, again with better price/power/heat/noise to performance ratio. No brainier....

Unless you are already locked in the proprietary CUDA platform (poor you), there is no value add to the Nvidia platform (as in more value than the competition). 3D vision and Physx are NOT value add. First, ATI is about to release Stereoscopic 3D technology too and Physx, beside being another closed proprietary technology, is only supported in and handful of game, out of witch 75% suck terribly. The point is, OpenCl is about the take center stage and render all this Nvidia totalitarian package obsolete. Everything your Nvidia card do now, ATI is doing already or will do soon, in an open format. BTW, Nvidia is porting all their apps to OpenCL as we speak...

The only thing going for Nvidia Fermi is massive DPFP, C++, ECC and a very good lead in SDK compared to ATI. Let's then hope this will be taken care of by either ATI next chip Southern or Northern Island. Oh, and did I mention Southern Island already taped out and is scheduled for Q3-Q4 2010 release? Even an highly improbable (considering current abysmal yield) GT100 512 CUDA core at full speed (800+ Mhz) card won't stand a chance. I predict someone will have Jen-Hsun Huang's head very soon.

Ramon