So, whats happened to the GTX 470/480

PC Perspective - NVIDIA GeForce GTX 480 and GTX 470 Review - GF100 and Fermi tackle gaming

A very well written, balanced review. I particularly liked this line near the end that shows the value of competition in the market.

One more thought worth considering. Do you remember the initial price of the GTX 280 graphics card, the first GT200 offering? $649. That was in a time when NVIDIA was unconstrained by pricing as they were the performance leader and dominated in the market. Now, thanks to AMD and the pressure they have been placing on NVIDIA with the Radeon HD 5000-series of cards, NVIDIA was forced to release this generation at a much lower price when we ARE 100% SURE the cost of making them has not gone down. Even NVIDIA fans need to be happy that AMD is around it would seem.

www.scan.co.uk have put the 4x0s up:

http://www.scan.co.uk/shops/nvidia/gf100

Think I'll settle for a GTX470

Nothing stops scan either, they already have their GTX480 SLI system up for sale too:

http://3xs.scan.co.uk/ShowSystem.asp?SystemID=1096

If your looking for 5870 performance with a cheaper initial price tag, the 470 is for you, though in the long run the 100W difference in power consumption will cost you approximately an additional 35$ per year though. Plus the heat issue may be a large factor with those who don't have high airflow cases.

After reading the reviews tonight, the GTX 480 is really disappointing from my perspective. Since I have a GTX 295 Co-Op card, there's no point in considering this for an upgrade. In fact, in many tests my 295 beat the 480. If NVIDIA wants enthusiasts to upgrade to their latest, then they better do something much more impressive than this.

And the 5970 is faster than my 295, but my 295 can beats or match it with some games.

It looks like I'll have to either wait for the dual-GPU version of the 400 series or wait for ATI's next generation before upgrading. But that is a good thing since I get more life out of my 295. :)

So for us with a 285, 295, 5870, or 5970, the GTX 480 isn't worth it from the posted benchmarks at various hardware sites (unless you play only DX11 games, which are few and far in-between). I wonder what the card could do with 512 cores instead of the 480 cores with 32 disabled? Probably a little better at least. It's a shame they have such a poor design to get reliable fab for the Fermi.

I'm not a loyal fan of either, as I go with whatever has the best product in my opinion at the time (had both ATI and NVIDIA cards in the past). ATI is still looking like the current champ with the 5970 (though that card is long and expensive, and runs hotter than my 295 Co-Op card).

hm... not bad on the benches i've seen....still way behind the 5970 though.... it is ahead of the 5870 in most games.... even if it did take them six+ extra months hm.... lets see now just to wait for the new ati card

PizzaMan, don't compare a single GPU card to a card that has two GPUs. The GeForce GTX480 IS the fastest mono GPU card. Not by a big margin, but it is. The card has early problems such has overheating and noisy but I'm pretty sure that nVidia partners will be able to make a decent card without being too noisy and overheating.

Anyway, the day that this GPU will be on a double GPU card, it'll kick the Radeon 5970's posterior.

I wouldn't say it's "way behind", there's a few benchmarks where the GTX480 can keep up with the 5970, but yea, I'd still expect the 5970 to out perform the GTX480.

What we have isn't what we were promised a year ago, it's not a 512 core monster, and the performance that were were promised isn't at 50% like it was suppost to be, but there's still an impressive card there. The GF100 core does have a lot of potential, and just in the GTX480, it's nowhere being used to what it's fully capable of. Now The high end cards are out, the low end versions will be out around summer, and whatever dual GPU variant will be put out, but Nvidia can also go back and re-work the GF100 core now to bring out whatever improvements can be done to it.

Lebon14 said:

Anyway, the day that this GPU will be on a double GPU card, it'll kick the Radeon 5970's posterior.

I don't know about the ability for them to make a dual GPU variant of this. As it is it's using a 6x8 connection for one GPU, with two I'd expect an 8x8x8 to power it, no one would have a power supply powerful enough to use it!

On the PCPer article I linked to, they were able to run two 480's in SLI, the total power draw was near 800W!

As it is, running a system with that kind of power draw would cost $200 a year in power, with conservative estimates!