Jon Peddie, president of market research firm Jon Peddie Research, said that while the GTX 480 runs hot, it's silent. He also said that all new CPUs and GPUs have temperature sensors that shut down the chip in case it gets too hot.

Bryan Del Rizzo, an Nvidia spokesman, said the GTX 480 is bigger, so it pulls more power than the earlier GTX 285, but he also said that claims of the chip generating excessive heat is "hogwash." A lot of the benchmarking results depend on the version of the card being tested and its driver, and may not corroborate with other testing results.

The 480 has a heat pipe to dissipate heat from the back of the card, so systems need to have proper airflow for quicker cooling, Del Rizzo said. Most modern desktops have effective heat-dissipation mechanisms to deal with the level of heat generated by the GTX 480. He also said the card has technology to clock down the GPU's speed in case the card overheats.

Nevertheless, the heat is an inconvenience for Falcon Northwest, which had to redesign systems to improve airflow to cool down the graphics cards and other system components quicker.

"Two cards placed next to each other in an SLI configuration is where they start ... hitting these heat and noise problems," Reeves said. SLI technology helps multiple graphics cards work together in a system to scale graphics performance. The company has no immediate plans to offer systems with three GTX 480 cards in PCI or SLI configurations due to "the massive amount of power pull and resulting heat," Reeves said.