Hot under the collar?
Perhaps it's the - technically still rumoured - impending announcement of the Radeon 6000-series GPUs from AMD, but there suddenly seems to be a lot of interest in factory overclocked GeForce GTX 480s. In its latest iteration, Point of View and its tuning shop TGT have brought out one of the fastest GF100-based cards we've ever seen - and managed to keep the noise levels to barely above a whisper.
The GeForce GTX 480 Ultra Charged Triple Fan Cooling (TFC) features a core-clock of 763MHz, shaders set to 1,526MHz and 1.5GB GDDR5 running at 3,800MHz. This is a small yet significant overclock compared to the stock speeds of 700MHz, 1,401MHz and 3,696MHz, making it one of, if not the fastest GTX 480 around.
The engineers have done more than just increase the speeds though. The three billion transistor chip is known to get a little warm, which is why the standard cooler could sound like a small jet-engine when the card was under load. TGT is promising that the specially designed three-fan cooler used on this GTX 480 is nearly inaudible to the human ear when in a closed case, yet it still manages to keep the temperatures low.
However, there does appear to be a major downside - namely the size of the cooler. The manufacturer hasn't confirmed exactly how tall it is, but it looks to take up at least three or three and a half PCI slots. Apparently this is the price that you have to pay for a near-silent GTX 480.
There's been no indication on pricing yet, but POV has promised that the GeForce GTX 480 UC TFC will be available on September 20.
