NVIDIA GeForce GTX 570 1.25GB Video Card Review

Final Thoughts and Conclusions

When the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 480 graphics card went to store shelves back in April 2010 it had an MSRP of $499 and while it was fast it was criticized for being too hot and power hungry. Here we are, eight months later and we see the GeForce GTX 480 becoming discontinued and eradicated by the GeForce GTX 570 1.25GB video card. The GeForce GTX 570 costs 30% less at $349.99 and offers an improved cooling solution and performance that is right around the same as the GeForce GTX 480. Obviously, the GeForce GTX 570 is the better video card as the price is lower, the card runs cooler and the performance is not significantly different. Compared to a GeForce GTX 470 the new GeForce GTX 570 blows that card out of the water as we saw a number of benchmarks where the GTX 570 was more than 30% faster. With a price point and performance at this level the NVIDIA GeForce GTX
570 should be able to do battle with the AMD Radeon HD 6950 and 6970
when those ‘Cayman’ GPUs are released by AMD next week.

The NVIDIA video card product lineup is rather interesting right now as you can see in the bullet list below.

• NVIDIA GeForce GTX 580 – $499
• NVIDIA GeForce GTX 570 – $349
• NVIDIA GeForce GTX 470 – $254
• NVIDIA GeForce GTX 460 1GB – $219
• NVIDIA GeForce GTX 460 768MB – $169
• NVIDIA GeForce GTS 450 1GB – $129

As you can see the GeForce GTX 480 and GTX 465 video cards have been removed from the lineup and the only original GF100 Fermi core product left is the GeForce GTX 470. We’ll take a wild guess and say that the GeForce GTX 470’s days are numbered as NVIDIA won’t be ordering GF100 wafers from TSMC to keep producing just one video card. That just doesn’t make sense; although, NVIDIA did inform us that GF100 GPUs are still used in their current Tesla graphics cards and even their GeForce 400M series of mobile parts, so who knows how long they will be around.

The GeForce GTX 580 is still the top dog when it comes to video cards, but the GTX 570 isn’t too far behind it in terms of performance. The GeForce GTX 570 overclocked similar to the GTX 580 and we were able to hit 825MHz on the core, 1650MHz on the shaders and 1088MHz on the memory. This is a nice little overclock that helped increase performance over 10% and that is more than enough to make the GeForce GTX 570 faster than the GeForce GTX 480. That is rather impressive as we are seeing a $350 NVIDIA graphics card beating out their old flagship card.

Legit Bottom Line: The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 570 stomps the GeForce GTX 470 and runs at the same performance level as the GeForce GTX 480 for much less money.