Performance Analysis

Most of the pre-overclocked cards we see have GPUs with which we’re fairly familiar – the cards are usually interesting twists on favourite GPUs. As it’s six months since we last saw a GTX 470 card, and prices have shifted so much, pouring over the data we generated was a little more interesting than usual. For example, in Dirt 2, we saw the Zotac surpass a Radeon HD 5870 by a considerable margin – at 1,920 x 1,200 with 4x AA the Zotac managed a minimum of 62fps compared to the 56fps minimum of the HD 5870.

The Zotac fared less well in STALKER: Call of Pripyat, however, with a minimum of 46fps at 1,920 x 1,200, while a HD 5870 can manage a minimum of 57fps. The Zotac could just about play the game smoothly at 2,560 x 1,600 with a minimum of 25fps, but the HD 5870 had much more headroom with a strong minimum of 35fps.

As we vaguely remember from our launch article, the GF100 GPU of the GTX 470 and GTX 480 loves AA in Crysis. With no AA applied, the Zotac was a little slower than the HD 5870 – at 1,920 x 1,200, it managed a weak minimum of 18fps compared to the 21fps of the HD 5870. With 4x AA applied, we saw the Zotac take the lead over the HD 5870 with a minimum of 17fps compared to 15fps. However, the frame rates of both cards in Crysis are too low for smooth gameplay (you’d have to play with merely High details settings we suspect).


However, we saw the same aptitude for AA when playing Battlefield: Bad Company 2 as we saw in Crysis, and this capability was more significant. With no AA applied, the HD 5870 was a notch slower than the Zotac – at 1,920 x 1,200 the HD 5870 could only manage a minimum of 48fps rather than the mighty 57fps minimum of the Zotac – but with AA applied we saw the Zotac completely dominate the HD 5870 when it came to the all-important minimum frame rate. While the average frame rate of the HD 5870 was only 5fps slower than that of the Zotac, its minimum was a significant 14fps less. At 2,560 x 1,600 with 4x AA, the Zotac was able to play the game while the HD 5870 stuttered.

While small fans can be loud and whiney, the Zotac’s 92mm fans were pleasingly quiet. Even when churning through Crysis, the quiet CPU cooler fan was the loudest fan in our PC, and that was barely audible. While the GPU ran a lot cooler under the Zotac’s Zalman cooler, remember that the GPU is the same old GTX 470 – it’s still creating a load of heat, it’s just that the heat is being drawn out and dissipated faster than with the reference cooler. As the fans of the cooler blow down on to the card, most of the heat ends up in your case.

We managed to crank the GPU core from Zotac’s already overclocked 656MHz up to 750MHz using Zotac’s FireStorm overclocking software, which resulted in the stream processors running at 1,500MHz rather than 1,312MHz. We also raised the memory frequency from 851MHz (3.4GHz effective) to 888MHz (3.55GHz effective). We could have gone further, but the automatic fan control didn’t increase the speed of the fans, resulting in overheating. We tested with the fans at 70 per cent speed, but even this was too loud for our tastes. At 1,920 x 1,200 with no AA, Crysis increased by 3fps, a 17 per cent boost.

Conclusion

The price cuts that Nvidia and its partners have applied to the GeForce GTX 470 have made it a strong contender if you’re looking to spend a little over £200 on a new graphics card. However, bear in mind that basic cards featuring the reference cooler will be noisy. Zotac has eliminated this problem by using a very quiet and effective cooler in the form of the Zalman VF3000F, and has added some extra performance by carrying out a mild overclock. The result is a quiet card that hammered through almost every game we threw at it.

Overall, the Zotac is faster than a basic HD 5870, as only in STALKER was the HD 5870 conclusively faster, and never to the extent that it was able to play the game when the Zotac couldn’t. In other games, the Zotac lost much less performance than the HD 5870 when we used AA. While the cooler might dump the heat of the GTX 470 into your case rather than out through the back, the combination of quiet cooling and high levels of performance for less than £300 make this a desirable card to own. Now you’ll have to excuse us, as we have a three-course banquet of hats and humble pie to get through.

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• 8/10

• Features
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• 8/10

• Value
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• 8/10

• Overall
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• 8/10

Score Guide