Our today’s review features Gainward GTX 480, currently the fastest single GPU graphics card. Of course, we’re talking about a Fermi GF100-based card announced about a month ago. Fermi is the family name for the latest generation of GPUs from Nvidia, and naturally comes with DirectX 11 support. The first Fermi derivative is the GF100 GPU - Nvidia’s internal code name for the first Fermi based chip that is used for the high end GTX 480 and GTX 470 cards. With about 3.2 billion transistors in 40nm, GF100 is the largest graphics processor ever to be announced (AMD's RV870, which is used in the ATI Radeon HD 5870, is comprised of roughly 2.15 billion transistors)
Gainward’s GTX 480 card runs at reference clocks, just like the rest of the GTX 480 pack we’ve seen so far.
Unlike ATI, this is the first time Nvidia used GDDR5 memory on its high-end cards whereas the red team resorted to that a couple of years ago. Gainward’s GTX 480 packs 1536MB of memory.