Inno3D GTX 480 iChill Review: Water-Cooled Fermi

The reviewer managed 'only' 850MHz core frequency due to a lack of software that allows overvoltage. Nevertheless, it looks quite an interesting card having a much lower idle power consumption and of course operating temperature than the reference GTX 480. Question is: how empty will your wallet be after you've bought it?

The Inno3D GTX480 iChill Black Series graphics card is a beast, there is no denying that fact based on what we have seen. Those prepared to do a little overclocking, which we suspect will include anyone looking at buying a water-cooled graphics card, will be rewarded. Out of the box the GTX 480 iChill Black Series is a water-cooled GeForce GTX 480 that is at best 3% faster than a standard card. Having that said, it is a hell of a lot quieter and way cooler when under load, two massive improvements right there. As we insisted throughout the review, there is no sense in not tinkering with the card's settings and taking full advantage of the water-cooling provided. Do some overclocking of your own and you will find performance gains in the order of 10 to 20%. Holding us back on the overclocking front was the lack of voltage adjustments. This raises the concern for the lack of overclocking software support for this graphics card. In fact, it wasn't until we used the Nvidia System Tools that we received any kind of real overclocking support at all.