Final words and conclusion

Final words and conclusion

Very sexy ...  yep, I like it -- Anarchy !  The KFA2 GeForce GTX 480 LTD OC Anarchy edition with its default factory overclock offers a nice bump in performance compared to the reference product. But the assessment and focus here is the simple fact that the cooler is just so much better than the reference cooler from NVIDIA. Now don't get me wrong, you will loose three slots and you'll need a proper ventilated chassis as a lot of residual heat heat is still dumped inside the PC. But a decent in and outtake fan will do that job just fine.

I have one remark though, the product as delivered is fine, not too noisy ... but it can be more silent. The FAN RPM is locked at 45% at all times which makes the three fans spin like a merry go round at over 2350 rotations per minute. This results in airflow that you definitely can hear, yet it's not annoying or anything, no Sir. But the simple fact is that the cooler does not need that much airflow. We stressed the card while configuring fan rotation (RPM) at 30%, the result was that DBA levels dropped to near silent at roughly 40 DBa. At this setting we only reached 57 Degrees C after fully stressing the GPU.

As such we like to recommend KFA2/Galaxy to go for the 30% FAN RPM with the final batches. It is the difference (noise wise) for this product to get labeled from "Good" to being "bloody brilliant", because at 30% FAN RPM you maintain excellent GPU temperatures while the card can hardly be heard.

But hey ... as they say in Asia, we here in Europe and USA are very anal when it comes to noise levels and sure, perhaps we are being overly critical here as never ever there was so much hype about noise levels with graphics cards.

Alright, so noise levels are excellent, but can be brilliant, let's keep it at that. The cooling performance is very impressive. Even with added GPU voltage and an overclock towards 900 MHz on the GPU core we still did not pass 65 Degrees C with that GPU humped, stressed and dominated with a whip. If you take a reference baseline GTX 480 and compare it to this product at a 900 MHz clock frequency then that's 20 to 25% extra performance over the baseline NVIDIA product and in the world of high-end that is a mighty lot of extra perf. You have to admit that NVIDIA's GTX 400 product lines do scale wonderful when overclocked. Of course overclocking isn't really a necessity anyway with a product of this caliber, the factory overclock already adds another 10% of extra perf.

Any game to date will play fine in the highest resolutions with at least 4x Antialising enabled and the very best image quality settings. So performance is just not an issue. On that topic, we do still wonder though why NVIDIA still has not released the full 512SP version of the GPU.

Final words then; we seriously like what we tested today. As stated if NVIDIA would have addressed heat and noise levels from the very beginning, the TDP would have been something the end-users could live with. That exact same sentiment I seem to have with the KFA2's Anarchy GTX 480 LTD OC. The sheer size of the cooler doesn't make it perfect, but if LCS is not your thing then this really is the best solution for this graphics card. The excellent cooling performance and sheer noise levels bring a smile to my face, whilst knowing that we still have a lot of extra performance left to tweak with. So as far as the GeForce GTX 480's go, this one is simply top of the line and as such comes very much recommended. It's like an entirely new card to fool around with, and it just did not disappoint.

As I like to say, you either have to be first, best, or different to be able to make a difference. A proper custom cooled GeForce GTX 480 was way long overdue, KFA2 is now amongst the first to release such a product. Nice job.

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