GPUs that cost $500 are all well and good, but the sweet spot for high-end graphics cards is in the $350–$400 range. That’s still a good chunk of change, but it can get you a card with close to 90 percent of the performance of high-end cards.
That’s certainly true of EVGA’s GTX 470 SC. Built on a cut-down version of Nvidia’s high-end, DirectX 11 GPU, this card posted eyebrow-raising benchmarks, pretty much putting it into a class of its own.
EVGA’s super-clocked GTX 470 GPU ships with 448 shader processors, running at 625MHz, with a shader clock of 1,280MHz. That’s a 3 percent faster core clock and 2.5 percent faster memory frequencies than the stock GTX 470. (The GTX 480 uses 480 shader processors at 700MHz). The 320-bit-wide memory interface pumps data to 1,280MB of GDDR5 running at 850MHz (3,400MHz effective.) Of course, the card supports the usual set of Nvidia features, including hardware SLI, PhysX acceleration, and 3D Vision Surround video.
Continue reading this review after the jump.
