Toms Hardware has their massive 20 page review online talking about everything you ever wanted to know about the new Fermi GeForce cards, and ends up breaking it down into 3 main things: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. The cliff notes (reduced for size):
First, the good—performance. Fortunately for Nvidia, it had a few targets in the Radeon HD 5970, 5870, and 5850 as it was generating specs. While we’re sure the company wishes it was shipping 512-shader cards instead of pared-down boards, it’s hitting high-enough clocks to make GeForce GTX 480 and GeForce GTX 470 generally-faster than Radeon HD 5870 and Radeon HD 5850. (…)
What about the bad? Well, getting your feet in the door here costs $350. A flagship GeForce GTX 480 runs $500. Radeon HD 5850s recently dropped back down to $300 and Radeon HD 5870s can be found around $400. Though the GeForce cards are faster than their single-GPU competition, the premium is hard to swallow if power and display connectivity are important to you, and less-so if PhysX, CUDA, or 3D Vision are more interesting. Do we expect AMD to drop its prices in response? Don’t count on it. (…)
Then there’s the ugly: power. Nvidia argues that the enthusiast space isn’t as sensitive to figures like power consumption, and that lofty load figures still only translate to a few dollars per year. (…) Of course, that power invariably gets dissipated as heat, and thus the GTX 480, in particular, becomes a very hot card, cresting 160 degrees Fahrenheit on its surface during game play.
Be sure to go read the full review for all the details.
@A B Well, Amazon lists a Sapphire Radeon 5870 1GB GDDR5 for $399 (pre-order).. And you can get an XFX Radeon HD5870 1GB from “Bland Capital Managment” For $400, but I’m not so sure about it.
Other than that, the lowest prices I see are approximately $420 and up.
I meant to say I’d like to know where Tom’s found that $400 5870.
I’d like to know where you found that $400 470. I looked all of yesterday and found the cheapest 470 to be $358 (with shipping) and 5870 to be $420. That’s a price difference of $62. Given the 5870 performs about the same as the 470 according to a video review I watched, to suggest there is only a $50 price gap would be to undermine the value/performance of the 470.
The Good:
1) The tessellation in the GTX480 is superb, even if it is not really used yet in games.
2) OpenCL performance is superb
The Bad:
1) Less than 512 cores
2) No ECC
3) No 3DVision Surround
4) No NVIDIA surround (ATI’s Eyefinity is safe for now)