At some time during the week of April 12, 2010, Fermi will actually arrive.  Until then you have to live vicariously through hardware reviews, but there is more than a few of them around the interwebs. 

The best place to start are the faults in the Fermi architecture and the GTX 470 and 480 as the rumours preceding the launch of these cards can finally be confirmed or denied.  As has been mentioned many times previously this card is hot.  The GPU its self, underneath the heatsinks and fans sits at a balmy 93C which ought to make owners of 4870’s and 5870’s feel a little better.  That is a significant amount of heat to have to distribute especially if you are thinking about an SLI setup, which you might when you see how effective that is.  In his testing Ryan noticed that idling, the single GTX 480 drew just a bit more than the HD 5970 but 137W more than an HD 5870.  At load you can expect 78W of additional power draw compared to the HD 5870.  Suddenly kilowatt class PSUs make a lot more sense.

There is good news, in that the performance of the GTX 480 is comparable to the semi-mythical HD 5970.  AMD’s dual GPU card is almost impossible to find and when it is spotted, its price could be far above the MRSP of $699.  If nVIDIA can hit their announced price of $499 will spell big trouble for AMD on two fronts.  It is much less than the HD 5970 and hopefully it will be easier to find, so many gamers with the cash will choose nVIDIA’s solution.  Bigger trouble lies in the performance contrast with the HD 5870 as the GTX 480 is simply a better card and should only cost about $50 more.

[H]ard|OCP reveals the second front that NVIDIA has claimed victory on.  The SLI scaling is incredible, easily surpassing the HD 5970 in any situation and allowing the usage of AA at very high resolutions.  Those with an SLI system gain access to 3×1 display NV Surround, the equivalent of EyeFintiy but with two big differences.  No DisplayPort adaptor or monitor is required, you can have an all DVI setup.  The second advantage requires a bit more of a cash investment, but if you pick up their 3D Vision kit you might even be playing on 3 monitors in 3D.  Of course, the cards themselves will set you back about $1000 and there is the small issue of powering them and cooling your system.


“Fermi is finally here! We put the new GeForce GTX 470 and GeForce GTX 480 video cards through the paces in four of the latest and most demanding games recently released. We find time for GeForce GTX 480 SLI as well. We compare these to the Radeon 5850, Radeon 5870, and the Radeon 5970.”

Here are some more Graphics Card articles from around the web:

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