Custom PCB GTX 480 Designs Show Interesting Developments

Over at EXPreview, some photographs have surfaced of the shortened version of the GTX 480. This PCB design appears to be a complete redesign of the GTX 480 that we recently reviewed from Nvidia. The interesting thing is, these designs are beginning to surface before cards are even globally available through retailers. This fact brings us to believe that AIBs have been working on these designs for quite some time and that a redesign has long been in the cards.

This non-reference card appears to feature not only a shorter card length, but it also should have dual 6-pin power connectors as opposed to the current 8 + 6 pin design. In addition to that, there is a possibility that these cards could launch at the same clocks as the reference cards but possibly be hampered in overclocking by their dual 6 pin design. This design is drastically different from even the first custom PCB cards that we reported on  around the time of the GTX 480 launch.

As we’ve stated before in our GTX 480 review, there will likely be a ton of custom PCB designs out there that could possibly help Nvidia stay in the game, although as it stands right now there still aren’t any GTX 480’s out there for sale yet and the card is indeed quite hot and power hungry. AIBs hope to remedy both of these issues with custom coolers and non-reference designs.

Taiyanfa’s custom design PCB lowers the maximum power consumption to 225W [75W from PCIe x16, two 6-pin connectors count for additional 150W total], which is most probably achieved by lowering the GPU clock. However, we see a lot of potential in this design – for instance, populating six PCIe slots on All-PCIe boards such as ASUS P6T6/P6T7 or EVGA’s X58 Classified 4-Way SLI for a GPGPU computing monster, single card design for HTPC chassis, or simply users that don’t have 8+6-pin power – such as numerous workstation chassis or already assembled computers from Dell, HP and the like.

Original Author: Anshel Sag

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