Gadgetory

today we'll be unboxing a ZOTAC GeForce GTX 480 card this is their highest end geforce card at the moment they're actually going to be releasing in the upcoming weeks an amp version of this and it's going to actually have a triple slot cooler it's going to be clocked a little bit higher that's going to be pretty cool but for now this is what we have to work with and this is what I'm going to be using for an upcoming episode of NCIS tech tips like I realize I'm a little late to the GTX 480 unboxing party but what are you going to do I needed it for something else anyway so I might as well unbox it so the first thing that you should notice about the zotac box is it has a cool metallic guy on it okay that might not be the first thing the first thing you should notice about the zotac box is this deckle right here the orange one there EXO TAC extended warranty so what that means is ZOTAC now offers lifetime warranties on all of their high-end g-force products so you have to register the card after you get it but a lifetime warranty can be worth its weight in gold if you actually end up having a problem later on down the line it also comes with the zotac boost software suite so that includes bada-boom for encoding videos v real for enhancing videos I've never actually heard of this one but it seems to be called super something super loyola scope or something like that apparently that's for editing videos I've never heard of that one and then you've also got bitdefender internet security so most of these are CUDA applications so that means that they can actually use the GPU rather than your CPU to do that video encoding and to enhance your video so that's a pretty neat feature it's compatible with all cuda GPU so that means anything basically from an 8800 on up to the GTX 480 which is the latest and greatest it has 1.5 gigs of memory on board it supports physics as well as obviously CUDA which I was talking about before 384 bit memory interface it has HDMI onboard and let's get around to the back so actually let's talk minimum system requirements for a minute and you need a PCI Express slot it doesn't need to be pcie 2.0 but if you're really installing a card like and a PCIe one motherboard you might want to re-evaluate your system upgrade you need one six pin and one eight pin PCI Express connector this is a power-hungry card I've actually done a few videos already on the power consumption of four GTX 480 s but I haven't really done anything on a single card I don't think so maybe that's something nothing worth worth touching on let me see what else we have on here as well so it's DirectX 11 that's another thing that I should probably mention you've got full support for DirectX 11 including tessellation which is one of the big features that Nvidia is touting about the GTX 400 series in general is that they have excellent tessellation performance so that's going to be one of the ways to improve image quality with DirectX 11 over what we had with DirectX 10 so as far as accessory package goes we've got two molex to PCI Express connectors one of them is a six pin and I'm gonna hold this here long enough for the camera to actually focus cuz usually it doesn't bother to focus and then I've got one that is oh oh this is interesting okay so I have one that is two molex to one PCIe six pin that I just showed you and then this one is two PCIe six pin to one PCIe eight pin so if you have a power supply that was sort of like woefully under connected so let's say you've got aa og how'd you do this so if you only had two PCI 6 pin I guess what you could do is you could take your two PCI 6 pin plug them into here plug that into the 8 pin and then take 2 molex connectors 4 pins and plug this into the 6 pin so then you would have power to your video card I have one DVI to VGA adapter and rather than being a boring beige one it's like a clear plastic one big fan then I have one mini HDMI to HDMI adapter so if you're going to use HDMI and you want to be able to plug your video card into an HDMI display then that will be useful because mini HDMI is not all that common yet these days okay inside here we have a bunch of pieces of paper let's have a look at these really briefly first of all it says before booting your PC make sure you plug in the power also please your graphics card to cool before touching it after operation these things get toasty we've got DirectX 11 and technology demos up well okay so this includes some technology demos from Nvidia for DirectX 11 very neat then we have a ZOTAC driver CD download the latest drivers off the Nvidia website as if I haven't said that enough times the latest drivers are awesome they add a whole bunch of functionality and a whole bunch of performance for the GTX 400 series then we have the zotac boosts GeForce accelerated a software thing there we go they're just telling us a little bit more about it then we have the zotac extended warranty and quick installation guides so they talked a lot about the terms and conditions of the warranty I actually checked out ZOTAC STIs and sees of the warranty before I started this video and they have one of the better ones out there because a lot of the time you know you might say see lifetime warranty asterisks and then it turns out that lifetime warranty means like as long as that products available or some other kinds of clutches but the zotac one actually looks really good and that's going to be one of the subject of one of the tech tips videos that we're going to be doing around this card is actually how important warranty support is when you're dishing out a few hundred dollars for a graphics card this is a user's manual it has their metallic guy on it and then let's actually have a look at the card itself so this is a reference GTX 480 that means it is a standard length card it has its standard connector so we've got two DVI and one mini HDMI although it only supports two displays out at a time up at the top we've got our two sli connectors so this video card does support up to four-way SLI if you check out my previous videos I've actually shown some demos with four-way SLI running in the cooler master half next case up at the top you can see four of the five heat pipes that are used in this cooler the last one is actually I'm just going to get up and sort of show you the card a little better here the last one is actually down in there so you can see number five so these five heat pipes are basically all positioned directly over the GPU itself and then they're taking that heat and dispersing it out into this ginormous cooler here this is actually a heatsink surface as well this is not a shiny plastic cover so it's very serious about dissipating heat from the GeForce GTX 480 here we've got our 8 pin PCIe as well as our 6 pin PCI II and speaking of heat dissipation here is our fan that'll be doing all of the heat dissipation it has access not only to airflow from the front but also from the back of the card through a couple of holes in the PCB we first saw this on in videos dual GPU cards but now it's actually made its way to their single GPU cards now that they run so postie here is our pcie 2.0 16x connector as well as what else do we even have here ah here more more vents no no actually that's kind of interesting ok so at the back here this is actually just like no access to the fan whatsoever so all of the fans airflow is going to be blowing out through the back of the cart so unlike ATIS 5870 the whole back slot here is dedicated to air being expelled from the case whereas with the 5870 you've actually got another DVI connector here and you've only got exhaust from half of it so that's one way to get better airflow is by not blocking off your case air from going outside anyway ok this is getting a little bit long thank you for checking out my unboxing of the zotac GTX