Design: The look of the cooler is quite good, but nothing flashy either. While design is a personal matter, the GTX 480 looks rather stylish, and it should fit in most computer cases.

Benchmarks:

Gaming tests were run at 1680x1050 and 1920x1200.

3D Mark 2006, 3D Mark Vantage, Battlefield: Bad Company 2, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, Left 4 Dead 2, Resident Evil 5, Crysis Warhead, FurMark, FRAPS GPU-Z

Temperatures wer tested with FurMark.

In Colin McRae: Dirt 2, The GTX 480 is in between 23-26% faster than the Radeon 5870.

In S.T.A.L.K.E.R: Call of Pripyat the GTX 480 has playable framerates and is ahead of the Radeon cards.

Test Setup:

CPU: Core i7 920 -- Mainboard: ASUS Rampage II Extreme -- Memory: 3X2GB Kingston HyperX DDR3 -- PSU: Enermax Galaxy EVO 1250W

Compared To:

Radeon HD5870, HD5850, HD5830, HD5770, HD5670.

Overclocking: There was a final stable overclock of 887MHz Core and 1023MHz Memory, this represents an increase of 27% and 11%, respectively.

Conclusion: The ASUS GeForce GTX 480 has a very impressive performance, with the ability to overclock well beyond stock speeds and a voltage tweaking offered with Smart Doctor.

Noise: The reference Nvidia heatsink and fan run loud to prevent a rise in temperatures.