Inno3D GTX 480 iChill Review: Water-Cooled Fermi

Inno3D offers an impressive range of graphics cards based solely on Nvidia GPUs and that's the reason we haven't seen a lot of action from them in recent months. With the delay of the GeForce GTX 400 series Nvidia’s exclusive board partners were left hanging for a while there. Although older GeForce models were still pretty competitive, ATI successive launches kept pushing the efficiency and price envelope release after release.

Either way, if that was reason enough to have manufacturers looking into custom board designs and cooling offerings out of the box, then you won't hear us complaining. Besides your run of the mill reference-based boards, Inno3D produced a number of impressive GeForce GTX 200-based products, such as their GTX Accelero line and the flagship of them all, the GTX 295 Black Series that added a large water-cooling block for heavy overclocking.

Introducing the AXLE 3D GT 240

When you think video cards, you think of the major vendors such as Sapphire, HIS, Gigabyte, ASUS, EVGA, MSI, and XFX among a few others between the ATI and NVIDIA camps. Well, today we're looking at a card from a company that is unknown to most Americans, but has actually been around for over twenty years, AXLE 3D. Based out of Hong Kong, AXLE 3D primarily sells their NVIDIA-based products around Asia and Europe which is why they have remained under the radar to most end users in North America. That is about to change, as they are now expanding to the United States. They are currently only available at the small online e-tailer, Fookbuy.com, and they hope to spread across to all major retail mediums and this will be a welcome addition as more manufacturers means more competition which is always better for the consumer.

The card performed well in most of the benchmarks and all the games I have tested are playable at 1280x1024 resolutions, without AA; with AntiAliasing, the video card has lower performance and sometimes the frames drop lower than needed to assure smooth gaming. The card does not feature an extra power connector which is a plus and tells us of the low power consumption this card does have. This board does also feature PhysX and CUDA, which helps in games and various other applications. Kaspersky just announced that their latest antivirus will support CUDA and virus scans will be much faster.

We've heard of AXLE, but haven't had the pleasure of dealing with them until today. Looking at the box, there isn't anything out of the unusual with the most standout bit being the mention that the card comes with an Arctic Cooling cooler...

That's Inno3D showing off two of the cards in tantalising SLI action. That's two of the world's fastest graphics cards, water-cooled, pre-overclocked, and looking downright sexy.