Right, as always ... the box .. so you know what to look for in the stores. The card is well packaged but does not come with a lot of extra's though.

For 499 USD / 475 EUR, you only get the basics. No added value is to be found in the package, you'll receive the card, PEG converter cables, manual and a demo and driver CD and a HDMI converter.

Overall a nice and dark looking card. But let's look at the card from several different viewpoints, the GTX 480 card is quite good looking and roughly 26,5 CM / 10.4" length wise.

The GeForce GTX 480 comes with no less than 1536 MB memory. And that should be enough alright. The card itself is clocked at a 700 MHz core frequency, 1400 MHz on the shader processors and the gDDR5 memory runs at an effective ~3700 MHz. Combined with a 384-bit wide memory bus you'll get very high memory bandwidth up-to 177 GB/s and 134 GB/s for the 320-bit wide GTX 470.

Connectivity wise we see two dual-link DVI connectors supporting all high-resolution monitors and all the way to the left you can see a mini HDMI connector. Mini HDMI was chosen to be able to position the connector at the lower half, so that the top half can exhaust hot air. You will need a special HDMI cable due to this. One could wonder why DisplayPort was not opted, then again .. if you like to hook up a High-Definition TV, HDMI certainly is more convenient.