The NVIDIA GeForce (-, GTS, GTX) 400-500 series (Fermi Architecture), are they worth buying?

Now before you ask the question “why would I buy an old card when I can simply buy a new one instead?” this review is mainly written for the sole purpose of educating people that want to buy cards but are on a tight budget; with the new cards ranging from 250 to 700 us dollars in today’s markets it is hard for a lot of gamers to simply whoop out the cash and buy these new flagship GPUs. Nevertheless, this doesn’t necessarily mean that there is no other way to play the games of 2017 with a budget range of less than 200 dollars. And this my friends are where the fermi chips come in.



 Although the fermi chips are considerably old and thus can’t offer the best gaming adventure, most of them are within the price range of less than 100 us dollars making it easier for a lot of people to fit this cards in to their budgets. So now that we have got the money issue out of the way let’s talk about the ups and downs, performance wise, of using these GPUs.


The fermi architecture was first released in April, 2010 as a replacement for its older brother the tesla architecture – which contained the iconic GTX 200 series – with a wide range of new capabilities of which the main ones were improved tessellation in games and DirectX 11 support (now also supports dx12). but like all tech releases these chips had a rocky start even before it was released to the public due to faulty models coming out of the assembly line – some rumors said that the yield percentages were single digit numbers of 8 percent which is by every sense of the word a disgusting statistics to look at – but NVIDIA quickly fixed the problem and the chips were made available 6 months after the scheduled day. But despite this start the GTX 400 series, especially the GTX 480 and 470, were sold at high numbers.



The fermi chips were, even at that time, chipper compared to their rivals AMD which were selling the ATI RADEON 5970 for 500 dollars while the GTX 480 was sold at a price 200 dollars lower than that of the 5970 while still having enough performance to go head to head with it. But the fermi chips also have a dark side too; NVIDIA claims that the watt usage of the GTX 400 series GPUs don’t exceeds those of their AMD rivals the 5000 series.



However, the truth couldn’t be further from the truth as these chips are extremely power consuming in nature and even have power consumption of 150 watts while idle – for those that didn’t get the meaning of the number a good reference would be to point out that the entire power consumption of your laptop isn’t greater than a hundred watts. And to make matters worse, these GPUs are subjects to overheating (expected because of their high TDPs) reaching temperatures of 97 degrees when experiencing some load making them a bad choice if one wants to Have a GPU that doesn’t make much noise cause a higher temperature automatically means higher fan speeds to cool it off and an even worse one if one has a PC case that slightly restricts the flow of air in to it which in most cases leads to the card getting fried (this is very rare as most PC cases are optimized for optimal air flow).



But that being said, the fermi chips are the cheapest chips that are capable of playing DX11
games as the older tesla GPUs are DX10.1 (trust me I have one and it is a pain in the ass) making them virtually useless in today’s world. So to sum it all up here are the pros and cons of buying a FERMI graphics card/GPU.

1. It is cheap with a price range of 45-200 dollars
2. It has full DirectX 11 support and with a new driver has minimal DX12 support
3. They can run most games without trouble (the GTX 470, 480, 550, 560…)
4. Driver support for these cards are still present

1. They have huge power consumption issues (but this is little considering that they will only add around 10-20 birr to your electric bill a year as compared to other cards at max)
2. They have overheating issues
3. They are noisy
4. They are bound to get outdated much sooner than other cheap alternatives like the GTX 700 series

So my personal advice to anyone reading this is to consider their budgets wisely cause if they are heavy gamers that are sadly bound by financial problems then the GTX 560 ti and 480 (has recently become expensive so the GTX 470 will do) might be a good fit for you but if you are a moderate gamer then it would definitely be better if you were to buy a card that is much quitter, doesn’t overheat and is newer which sadly doesn’t fit into the fermi category but rather the GTX 700 series mainly the GTX 730, 740 and 750 ti. I hope you have enjoyed reading this as much as I have writing it.