Inno3D GTX 480 iChill Review: Water-Cooled Fermi

Test System Specs & Notes

As mentioned earlier, Inno3D only supplies a driver CD with this graphics card and no extra software bundle for overclocking purposes. Considering this is a high-end water-cooled graphics card that is barely overclocked, we were hoping for more. Clearly users will want to push further, but none of the software we typically use would allow us to overclock the GTX 480 iChill Black Series, this included the MSI AfterBurner and EVGA Precision.

Thankfully Nvidia just updated their "System Tools" software, which did allow us to easily overclock the board. However unlike software provided by Inno3D's rivals, we were unable to adjust the card's voltage, which hampered the overclocking potential.

With standard voltages we managed to increase the graphics clock speed for fixed function units from Inno3D's 720MHz to 850MHz, an 18% frequency increase. The memory was also boosted from the 950MHz overclock Inno3D put in place to 1010MHz. This was a smaller 6% increase.

Now, I must admit it's been some time since I have played around with water-cooling, so I didn't have anything seriously impressive to test the GTX 480 iChill Black Series with. Instead I dug out the Thermaltake Bigwater 760i, which is a basic self-contained water-cooling unit, and connected it directly to the graphics card without any other components in the loop.

The 120mm fan was set to 2400 RPM, which is kind of loud in general, but whisper quiet in comparison to the standard GeForce GTX 480 air cooler. The operating temperatures were surprisingly good, which you will see towards the end of this review. With a more impressive water-cooling system we suspect even better results could be achieved.