For the launch of the first GF100-based video cards – the GTX 480 and GTX 470 – NVIDIA sent over a 3 card reviewer’s kit containing two GTX 480s and a single GTX 470. This allowed us to do SLI testing with the GTX 480 (a money-is-no-object setup) but not with NVIDIA’s significantly cheaper GTX 470. As part of a comprehensive SLI & CrossFire guide we’re working on for next month we needed a second GTX 470 for testing GTX 470 SLI operation, and MSI answered our call with their N470GTX.

Today we’ll be taking a look at MSI’s GTX 470. We’ll also be taking a sneak-peek of our forthcoming SLI/CF guide with a look at GTX 470 SLI performance.

MSI’s N470GTX is a reference-derived GeForce GTX 470 that’s largely – but not exactly – similar to the reference GTX 470. Clocked at the reference clocks of 607MHz core, 1215MHz shader, and 837MHz (3348MHz data rate) memory, the stock performance of the card is identical to the reference design. This also extends to cooling, where the card uses the reference GTX 470 cooler, and in terms of display capabilities with the card using the NVIDIA-standard 2xDVI + 1x HDMI configuration.

In terms of hardware, the biggest difference is the choice of component selection. MSI advertises this card of being part of their “Military Class” program, signifying that it uses solid state capacitors, chokes, and Hi-c (Tantalum) capacitors where appropriate. In practice the reference design already uses these types of components, however not in the number that MSI does. On our NVIDIA reference card there are a few locations for choke that were left open, whereas MSI has filled these locations with chokes.

Top: MSI N470GTX. Bottom: NVIDIA Reference

With only minor differences for the hardware, the bigger differentiating feature for the N470GTX is the software. As is the case with the rest of their cards, MSI bundles the N470GTX with their dynamic duo of overclocking tools: Afterburner and Kombustor.

Afterburner is MSI’s Rivatuner-based overclocking and monitoring suite, and a wonderful tool altogether. Going beyond straightforward overclocking controls, graphing, and an OSD, the most unique feature in Afterburner is that it offers support for voltage control on most of MSI’s cards, allowing for greater overclocking potential than what can be achieved on stock voltage alone. In the case of the GTX 470, MSI even enables overvolting support on non-MSI cards by allowing overvolting to be used with any reference-alike cards using the same VRMs as the N470GTX. This is a particularly generous move on MSI’s behalf, as it would be trivial to limit this feature to just MSI cards.

Meanwhile Kombustor is MSI’s FurMark-based load testing utility. In practice it’s virtually identical to FurMark, replacing FurMark’s furry donut with a furry version of the MSI logo.

The other significant piece of software included in the package is a voucher from NVIDIA and Capcom for one of 3 Capcom games: Street Fighter IV, Resident Evil 5, or Dark Void. The voucher is in lieu of a specific pack-in title, which is an interesting take on the pack-in game concept. Pack-in games can be hit & miss depending on whether you like the game or not, so a voucher is a much more interesting way to go about things, as it lets the buyer pick from a variety of games. The downside of course is that you’ll need a broadband connection to download the game since it’s delivered purely as a downloadable title rather than having any kind of disc packed-in.

Rounding out the package is the usual collection: a driver/utility CD, a multilingual quick-start guide, 2 molex-to-6pin PCIe power adaptors, a DVI-to-VGA adaptor, and a DVI-to-HDMI adaptor. The warranty on the card is 3 years.

As of this writing, Newegg has the card listed at $299 with a $20 mail-in rebate from MSI. Depending on your feelings towards MIRs, this is either some $30 below the GTX 470 MSRP of $330 a few short weeks ago, or at $280 approaching the price of the cheapest Radeon HD 5850s. NVIDIA and MSI have done a great job of being price competitive here, and as a result the N470GTX is priced only a stone’s throw away from the 5850 while being appreciably faster and including a free game at a time when most 5850s do not.

The Test

As the N470GTX ships at the reference clockspeeds of the GTX 470, we’re going to skip looking at reference performance. If you’d like to see the performance of a reference-clocked GTX 470, please skip ahead to our look at GTX 470 SLI performance, where the reference GTX 470 is listed among our results. Do note that due to the varying VIDs of GTX 400 series cards, power/temperature/noise data is not the same, as you will see in our overclocking section.

Also, after much demand and to go with the look at GTX 470 SLI performance, we have also added 5850CF performance to our charts.

MSI N470GTX: Power, Temperature, Noise, & Overclocking

As we’ve discussed in previous articles, with the Fermi family GPUs no longer are binned for operation at a single voltage, rather they’re assigned whatever level of voltage is required for them to operate at the desired clockspeeds. As a result any two otherwise identical cards can have a different core voltage, which muddies the situation some. This is particularly the case for our GTX 470 cards, as our N470GTX has a significantly different voltage than our reference GTX 470 sample.

While our reference GTX 470 has a VID of 0.9625v, our N470GTX sample has a VID of 1.025v, a 0.0625v difference. Bear in mind that this comes down to the luck of the draw, and the situation could easily have been reversed. In any case this is the largest difference we’ve seen among any of the GTX 400 series cards we’ve tested, so we’ve gone ahead and recorded separate load numbers for our N470GTX sample to highlight the power/temperature/noise range that exists within a single product line.

Quickly looking at load temperatures, in practice these don’t vary due to the fact that the cooler is programed to keep the card below a predetermined temperature and will simply ramp up to a higher speed on a hotter card.

This brings us to power consumption where the difference in VID makes itself much more apparent. With all things being held equal, under Crysis our N470GTX sample ends up consuming 7W more than our reference sample GTX 470. However under Furmark this becomes a 37W difference, showcasing just how wide of a variance the use of multiple VIDs can lead to in a single product. Ultimately for most games such a large VID isn’t going to result in more than a few watts’ difference in power consumption, but under extreme loads having a card with a lower VID GPU can have its advantages.

As we started before, the cooler on the GTX 470 targets a specific temperature, varying the fan speed to match it. With the higher VID and greater power consumption of our N470GTX sample, this means the card ends up being a good 3.7dB louder under Furmark than our reference sample, thanks to the higher power draw (and hence heat dissipation) of the card. Note that this is a worst-case scenario though, as under most games there’s a much smaller power draw difference between cards of different VIDs, and as a result the difference in load noise is also minimal.

Overclocking

With MSI’s Afterburner software it’s possible to increase the core voltage on the N470GTX up to 1.0875v, 0.0625v above the stock voltage of our sample card. Although by no means a small difference, neither is it more than the reference GTX 470 cooler can handle, so in a well-ventilated case we’ve found that it’s safe to go all the way to 1.0875v.

With our N470GTX cranked up to 1.0875v, we were able to increase the core clock to 790MHz (which also gives us a 1580MHz shader clock), a 183MHz (30%) increase in the core clock speed. Anything beyond 790MHz would result in artifacting.

Overclocking alone isn’t enough to push the N470GTX to GTX 480 levels, but it’s enough to come close much of the time. In cases where the GTX 480 already has a solid lead over its competition the overclocked N470GTX is often right behind it – in this case this means the overclocked N470GTX manages to consistently beat the Radeon 5870, something a stock-clocked GTX 470 cannot do.

But due to the use of overvolting, that extra performance means there comes a time to pay the piper. While our temperatures hold consistent the additional voltage directly leads to additional power draw and higher fan speeds. The overclocked N470GTX can approach GTX 480 performance, but it exceeds the GTX 480 in these metrics. In terms of load noise the overclocked N470GTX is pushing just shy of 100% fan speed, making it the loudest card among our test suite. Similarly, load power consumption under both Crysis and Furmark exceeds any of our stock-clocked single-GPU cards.

Ultimately overclocking the N470GTX provides a very generous performance boost, but to make use of it you need to put up with an incredible amount of heat and noise, so it’s not by any means an easy tradeoff.

GTX 470 SLI Performance

Moving on to our sneak peek of our SLI/CF article, we have our look at the performance of the GTX 470 in SLI. We’ll skip the running commentary in this case as in the majority of our charts the GTX 470 SLI is second only to the GTX 480 SLI. We’ll explain why this is once we’ve run through the charts.

GTX 470 SLI Performance, Cont

Having come from the launch of the GTX 480 and GTX 470 back in late March, NVIDIA has already done a lot to improve the performance of the GTX 470, and as a result in most of our GPU limited games the GTX 470 and the Radeon HD 5870 end up in a close battle for supremacy. This breaks down in Bad Company 2 and STALKER, where AMD still manages to hold on to a lead.

However we see a curious thing when looking at our GTX 470 SLI results: a single GTX 470 is often competitive with a Radeon 5870, but in SLI/CF this ceases to be the case. It’s clear from the first game that the GTX 470 is getting more out of SLI than the Radeon HD 5850/5870 are getting out of Crossfire, and as a result the GTX 470 SLI convincingly wins most of the games in our suite. Only in STALKER and Bad Company 2 do the Radeon cards scale better in CF than the GTX 470 in SLI, which is consistent with the fact that the Radeon cards already do very well in those games in the first place.

Overall the average multi-GPU scaling factor for the 5870CF is 1.71x while the average scaling factor for the GTX 470 is 1.82x. The GTX 470 undoubtedly does a better job scaling in multi-GPU configurations than the 5870 does, leading to the more clear-cut wins for the GTX 470 SLI.

GTX 470 SLI: Power, Temperature, & Noise

Wrapping up our look at the GTX 470 SLI, we’ll take a look at power, temperature, and noise. We have already well-established that GF100 cards can be particularly power hungry compared to their Radeon competition at similar performance levels, so this will give us a chance to see just what the situation is like when we throw multi-GPU in to the mix.

Having 2 video cards usually has a negative effect on idle conditions, and the GTX 470 SLI is no different here. Having a second card blocking the first pushes the temperatures of the first card up by 8C.

Load temperatures are similarly affected. The GTX 470 SLI ends up performing just like the GTX 480 SLI here, peaking at 96C under Crysis and stabilizing at 96C under Furmark. NVIDIA strongly suggests separating GTX 400 cards when in SLI for this exact reason – these results are when we already have a fan behind the cards. The Radeon cards do end up in a similar situation, but ultimately they still stay below 90C when in CF mode.

Compared to the GTX 480, the GTX 470 has noticeably lower idle power consumption, which cascades in to our SLI results. The 470 GTX SLI ends up consuming 55W less than the GTX 480 while idling, while consuming around 25W more than the Radeon cards in CF mode.

When the GTX 480 SLI became the most power hungry dual-GPU setup we’ve ever tested, there was little reason to believe that the GTX 470 SLI wouldn’t follow it, so these results shouldn’t be surprising. With Crysis the GTX 470 SLI pulls nearly 100W less than the GTX 480 SLI, but it still pulls between 100W-200W more than the Radeon cards in CF. Furmark is a similar story, but here the difference between the GTX 470 SLI and the Radeon cards is now 150W-250W.

Idle noise is more or less a solved problem. The vast majority of modern coolers emit almost no noise when idling, resulting in SLI having little impact on idle noise.

Our noise charts usually closely follow our power charts, so these results should not be surprising. With the partially obstructed GTX 470 card exceeding 90% of its top fan speed, the SLI combination is second only to the GTX 480 SLI. This is 8dB-11dB louder than the Radeon cards, and makes the GTX 470 SLI the clear winner/loser for the second-worst spot on our load noise charts.

Overall these results closely mimic what we saw with the GTX 480 SLI back when it launched: 1 GF100 card is hot & loud, and 2 cards are even hotter and louder. As the saying goes: cheap, quiet, high-performance – pick any 2.

Final Thoughts

When the GeForce GTX 470 first launched we recognized that NVIDIA did an appropriate job on pricing it purely on a performance basis. Based on performance alone it was priced correctly versus AMD’s cards, so that it performed in-line with the price. With its much greater power consumption (and the consequences of that) this didn’t make it a must-have card, but it did at least keep the GTX 470 on the table as a practical card to buy.

Today we’re seeing the devolution of a structured pricing strategy in to an all-out war, and MSI is leading the way. Coupled with NVIDIA’s recent driver improvements, GTX 470 cards like the N470GTX are now very close to being performance competitive with AMD’s top-end Radeon 5870 while costing significantly less. As far as reference-derived cards go, the N470GTX brings to the table all the things we like and dislike about the GTX 470, along with a fantastic set of overclocking tools and a free game for a price that’s competitive with the slower Radeon HD 5850.

Ultimately this makes for a very straightforward verdict on MSI’s N470GTX: at $300 (or $280 after a MIR) it’s a heck of a deal, and like the rest of the GTX 470 family at that price it has no peers when it comes to performance. However the caveat about power and heat still remains – it’s a very fast card for the price, but it’s also significantly hotter and louder than the Radeon HD 5850 it’s priced against. When performance is the only concern the choice is clear, but if you need to worry about power and noise then you need to decide whether you value performance or power more.

Meanwhile the GTX 470 SLI situation takes everything we’ve said about performance and power and amplifies it. When it comes to the GTX 470, NVIDIA clearly has a multi-GPU scaling advantage over AMD’s Radeon 5800 series. Two GTX 470s can beat a 5870CF setup the bulk of the time, but the noise is immense and the power difference is no less.

Wrapping things up, we will have more about SLI and Crossfire scaling next month when we take a comprehensive look at SLI/CF scaling. The GTX 400 series in 2-way SLI is only half the story – there’s still the matter of 3-way SLI and Crossfire to look at, so stay tuned.