 Today I'll be unboxing a Zotac GeForce GTX 480 card. This is their highest end GeForce card at the moment. They're actually going to be releasing in the upcoming weeks an AMP version of this. And it's gonna actually have a triple slot cooler. It's gonna be clocked a little bit higher. That's gonna be pretty cool, but for now this is what we have to work with. And this is what I'm going to be using for an upcoming episode of NCIX Tech Tips. Like I realize I'm a little late to the GTX 480 unboxing party, but what are you going to do? I needed it for something else anyway, so I might as well unbox it. So the first thing that you should notice about the Zotac box is it has a cool metallic guy on it. Okay, that might not be the first thing. The first thing you should notice about the Zotac box is this decal right here. The orange one there. Zotac Extended Warranty. So what that means is Zotac now offers lifetime warranties on all of their high-end GeForce products. So you have to register the card after you get it, but a lifetime warranty can be worth its weight in gold if you actually end up having a problem later on down the line. It also comes with the Zotac Boost software suite, so that includes Badaboom for encoding videos, Vreel for enhancing videos. I've never actually heard of this one, but it seems to be called Super Loyaliscope or something like that. Apparently that's for editing videos. I've never heard of that one. And then you've also got Bitdefender Internet Security. So most of these are CUDA applications, so that means that they can actually use the GPU rather than your CPU to do that video encoding and to enhance your video. So that's a pretty neat feature. It's compatible with all CUDA GPUs, so that means anything basically from an 8800 on up to the GTX 480, which is the latest and greatest. It has 1.5 gigs of memory on board. It supports physics as well as obviously CUDA, which I was talking about before. 384-bit memory interface. It has HDMI on board. And let's get around to the back. So actually let's talk minimum system requirements for a minute. And you need a PCI Express slot. It doesn't need to be PCIe 2.0, but if you're really installing a card like this and a PCIe 1 motherboard, you might want to reevaluate your system upgrade. You need one 6-pin and one 8-pin PCI Express connector. This is a power-hungry card. I've actually done a few videos already on the power consumption of four GTX 480s, but I haven't really done anything on a single card, I don't think. So maybe that's something that would be worth touching on. Let me see what else we have on here as well. So it's DirectX 11. That's another thing that I should probably mention. You've got full support for DirectX 11, including tessellation, which is one of the big features that NVIDIA is touting about the GTX 400 series in general, is that they have excellent tessellation performance. So that's going to be one of the ways to improve image quality with DirectX 11 over what we had with DirectX 10. So as far as accessory package goes, we've got two Molex 2 PCI Express connectors. One of them is a 6-pin, and I'm going to hold this here long enough for the camera to actually focus, because usually it doesn't bother to focus. And then I've got one that is... oh, this is interesting. Okay, so I have one that is two Molex to one PCIe 6-pin that I just showed you, and then this one is two PCIe 6-pin to one PCIe 8-pin. So if you had a power supply that was sort of like woefully under-connected, so let's say you've got... yeah, gee, how would you do this? So if you only had two PCIe 6-pin, I guess what you could do is you could take your two PCIe 6-pin, plug them into here, plug that into the 8-pin, and then take two Molex connectors, four pins, and plug this into the 6-pin. So then you would have power to your video card. I have one DVI2 VGA adapter, and rather than being a boring beige one, it's like a clear plastic one, big fan. Then I have one mini HDMI to HDMI adapter. So if you're gonna use HDMI and you want to be able to plug your video card into an HDMI display, then that will be useful, because mini HDMI is not all that common yet these days. Okay, inside here we have a bunch of pieces of paper. So we'll have a look at these really briefly. First of all, it says before booting your PC, make sure you plug in the power. Also, please allow your graphics card to cool before touching it after operation. These things get toasty. We've got DirectX 11 and technology demos. Oh, cool. Okay, so this includes some technology demos from Nvidia for DirectX 11. Very neat. Then we have a Zotac driver CD. Download the latest drivers off the Nvidia website, as if I haven't said that enough times. The latest drivers are awesome. They add a whole bunch of functionality and a whole bunch of performance for the GTX 400 series. Then we have the Zotac Boost GeForce Accelerated software thing. There we go. They're just telling us a little bit more about it. Then we have the Zotac Extended Warranty and Quick Installation Guide. So they talk a lot about the terms and conditions of the warranty. I actually checked out Zotac's Ts and Cs of the warranty before I started this video, and they have one of the better ones out there, because a lot of the time, you know, you might say, see, lifetime warranty asterisks, and then it turns out that lifetime warranty means, like, as long as that product's available or some other kinds of gotchas. But the Zotac one actually looks really good, and that's going to be the subject of one of the tech tips videos that we're going to be doing around this card, is actually how important warranty support is when you're dishing out a few hundred dollars for a graphics card. This is a user's manual. It has their metallic guy on it. And then let's actually have a look at the card itself. So this is a reference GTX 480. That means it is a standard length card. It has its standard connectors. So we've got two DVI and one mini HDMI, although it only supports two displays out at a time. Up at the top, we've got our two SLI connectors. So this video card does support up to four-way SLI. And if you check out my previous videos, I've actually shown some demos with four-way SLI, running in the Cooler Master Half-X case. Up at the top, you can see four of the five heat pipes that are used in this cooler. The last one is actually... I'm just going to get up and sort of show you the card a little better here. The last one is actually down in there. So you can see number five. So these five heat pipes are basically all positioned directly over the GPU itself. And then they're taking that heat and dispersing it out into this ginormous cooler. Here, this is actually a heat sink surface as well. This is not a shiny plastic cover, so it's very serious about dissipating heat from the GeForce GTX 480. Here we've got our 8-pin PCIe as well as our 6-pin PCIe. And speaking of heat dissipation, here is our fan. That'll be doing all of the heat dissipation. It has access not only to airflow from the front, but also from the back of the card, through a couple of holes in the PCB. We first saw this on Nvidia's dual GPU cards, but now it's actually made its way to their single GPU cards. Now that they run so toasty. Here is our PCIe 2.0 16x connector as well as... What else do we even have here? Ah, here, more vents. No, no, actually, that's kind of interesting. Hmm. Okay, so at the back here, this is actually just like no access to the fan whatsoever. So all of the fan's airflow is going to be blowing out through the back of the card. So unlike ATI's 5870, the whole back slot here is dedicated to air being expelled from the case. Whereas with the 5870, you've actually got another DVI connector here, and you've only got exhaust from half of it. So that's one way to get better airflow, is by not blocking off your case air from going outside. Anyway, okay, this is getting a little bit long. Thank you for checking out my unboxing of the ZOTAC GTX.