Maximum PC

well, it is really official now. The cards are posted on newegg, out of stock, but posted with prices non-the-less.

Nvidia GeForce 470
Nvidia GeForce 480

They are actually going to be sold at MSRP (at first anyway), and at least up to this point all the ATI prices are standing firm.


My opinion is that the 470 is a complete flop when compared to ATI, it is right on par or a little better than the 5850, but for only $50 more you can get a 5870 which is a good bit faster. That makes the 5870 a better investment for the increase in performance.

The 480 is in a decent position, it is better than the 5870, but the price gap and the performance gap is not the same, however it is better, so for the price an enthusiast would most likely get it over the 5870.

That is just looking at it strictly price vs. performance. When you factor in running temp, and power consumption, I got to say ATI still has the ball in their field. Nvidia might be able to get the ball back if they can come out with a duel gpu card that blows the 5970 out of the water.

Well the GTX 470 seems to be positioned right between the 5850 and 5870 in price and performance. Also the gtx 480 and 470 seem to be better than the 58xx line in the uniengine 2.0 with tessellation...might be a preview of performance in future full dx11 titles.

Both cards seem to be competitively priced for the performance they offer to me. That being said I'm happy with my 6 month old 5870!

I dunno, the 470 didn't really do well enough to justify the increased price.

and that assumes that the 5850 stays overpriced at $300 (remember it's supposed to be $260)

Please tell me it will go down to that soon. One of those and a new monitor would finally make my pc up to date.

at the current pricing, its doubtful. nvidia would have to drop prices on the 470 and thats a hard pill to swallow on such a large die. im willing to bet that pricing will stay about where its at.

as for my opinions on fermi, it seems nvidia was forced to make due with what they were given in the sense that these cards were supposed to have 512 and 480 SP's to begin with, but are shipping with 480 and 448 SP's. they use entirely way too much power for the performance advantage over their ati counterparts and i wouldnt be surprised if we dont see a dual fermi based card due to the power draw. i know that with dual 480's or 470's on one board doesnt extrapolate to double the wattage, however with single cards pushing 250 watts, that leaves very little room to wiggle with if you consider the current spec of 300w of power draw. Ati still has the performance crown and plenty of wiggle room wattage wise with their lower tier cards to release a hypothetical higher clocked version of the 5870 (5890?)

That's what I was thinking too. Whereas last gen the 4870 was too far behind the 280 for ATi to regain the single-GPU crown with the 4890, a 5890 could definitely leave the 480 in the dust.

"Official", sure...for the release of the NDA, pricing, and availability date. It's not actually official until they're available for sale...April 16th.