Yeah Vlad, how bout I put some phase change cooling on my lovely 5870 here so you can put that in your crack pipe and smoke it? So the cards just better at everything the GTX 480 does so THERE.

P.S. The GTX 480 is obsolete, the GT104 is a far better chip and the GTX 460 proves this as the full blooded version is faster than an HD 5850. Not bad for a cut down chip, eh?

Except that if you put the phase change cooling on the 480, it will completely blow the 5870 out of the water too.

I guess we will just have to wait and see then huh? Oh yeah, also if you water cool a single 480 you can push it to a good 20% gain without it ever even breaking a sweat.

Yes. Because the product fell about 20% short of its design clockspeeds due to thermal and yield issues. Which can be solved by you by bumping voltage and then water cooling as you say. But really it was an engineering failure on Nvidia's part. They don't make money on GTX 4xx cards because of those problems. Also the chip is 60% bigger than the 5870s, yet gets nowhere near 60% mor performance.

None of that matters to the end user of course, but if AMD didn't care about profit they could produce a chip with 60% more shaders (and make the same losses as NV because of it) and have the fastest graphics card. They chose profitability over owning the high-end.

AMD's next generation (September) will change that.

Then put THAT in SLI, and ATI will be left in the dust by a long gap. The card is just BETTER at everything than a 5870, unless you are some green freak, evironmentalist, or trying to lower your energy bill.

Yes, but I'd expect a lot more from it given how much bigger and more expensive to produce it is.

Also, in the link I posted, have you not noticed how under some settings, the 5870 doesn't even work? I'd expect that my video card to work with all games.

Those reviews are what I consider worthless. BSN in particular just makes up stuff with no sources. The truly neutral review sites I already linked (Anandtech and Tech Report) don't show any kind of failures and I can't see many complaints from real users on the rest of the web to contradict that. There are also AMD-leaning websites but I don't link to those either (e.g. HardOCP).

HardOCP is not biased soleron! They were called Nvidia biased not too long ago!

OK, they're more erratic than biased. Their GTX 470/480 review favours AMD quite a lot. Their methodology is weird compared to most reviewers too.

@vlad

Right now? I'd wait for Southern Islands.

Actually, since 5870 prices went up by $40 overnight, the GTX 480 and 5870 look similar in value now.