OCC:  When you get right down to it the GTX 480 offers up better performance than the HD 5870. That's the expectation the world had for this card. In 44 out of 48 tests run the GTX 480 delivered a higher level of performance, a pretty stout performance. In the four tests that it did not outright win, two showed performance equal to the HD 5870 and the two it lost were not by a large margin. With those kind of performance results I have to say that nVidia delivered a card that did what it was meant to do, deliver a higher level of performance. This was more evident in the newer games and DirectX 11 game and benchmark results where the GTX 480 cleaned house. The scoring in the Unigine 2.0 benchmark shows the strengths of the Fermi architecture with scores from the GTX 480 finishing almost 100% higher than the results of the comparison HD 5870 when the extreme tessellation preset is chosen. Metro 2033 testing showed that the performance in the Unigine testing was no fluke. The tesselation performance is a result of the all new Polymorph Tesselation engines that reside in each GPU cluster. Much of the early talk about the Fermi third generation Streaming Multiprocessor architecture was geared toward GPU computing, but make no mistake, this is a video card built for gaming as shown by the results. However, there is so much more that this card can be used for besides gaming; there are an abundance of GPU accelerated applications to make your life easier, such as Badaboom, Vreveal, WinZip, Photoshop and more. For those into the distributed computing scene there is a client that takes advantage of the massive parallel architecture to really push your contributions higher to hopefully help find a cure for some really heinous diseases. nVidia's stereoscopic 3D Vision system is not new to the market but supporting it over three monitors is a whole new way to enjoy this technology. When running with three monitors you have what is called 3D Vision Surround. If you don't want to use nVidia's 3D Vision system you still can enjoy a surround experience with GT 200 and higher based video cards. The downside is that to run the surround setup you need to run two cards in SLI. If you are going this route you still have the monitor purchase but you just need two cards to really have the horsepower to drive the 746 million pixels per second in a 3DSurround setup. That does add to the cost but really, if you are going that way you have some cash to get there. Pricing is expected to be in the $499 range, or about 50 to 80 dollars more than ATI's HD 5870. Steep but the price point is going to be expected and puts nVidia at a point where ATI may not cut prices, making this a bad situation for consumers. Time will tell though.

THG: 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. However, when you have the system power of a single-GPU card outstripping the total power of a faster dual-GPU board (despite their respective max. board TDPs, which we really can't vouch for), that's something to think about. We're not even talking about FurMark here—it's the Unigine performance, power, and efficiency index that put things into perspective. 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.

Anandtech: Moving on, we have the GTX 470 to discuss. It's not NVIDIA's headliner so it's easy to get lost in the shuffle. With a price right between the 5850 and 5870, it delivers performance right where you'd expect it to be. At 5-10% slower than the 5870 on average, it's actually a straightforward value proposition: you get 90-95% of the performance for around 87% of the price. It's not a huge bargain, but it's competitively priced against the 5870. Against the 5850 this is less true where it's a mere 2-8% faster, but this isn't unusual for cards above $300 - the best values are rarely found there. The 5850 is the bargain hunter's card, otherwise if you can spend more pick a price and you'll find your card. Just keep in mind that the GTX 470 is still going to be louder/hotter than any 5800 series card, so there are tradeoffs to make, and we imagine most people would err towards the side of the cooler Radeon cards.