Official Geforce GTX 480 and Geforce 470 Benchmarks Released

the way I see it, is that the production process is not fine tuned yet, the design of the chip is more than ok; if they get a chip out with full 512 stream processors and yield is good enough to provide for lower voltage requirements, you'll get a whole other product.

7% more power, high GPU clocks, speed boost of easily 30-35% over HD 5870, instead of 7-20% currently seen. At interesting power usage levels and good temps.

unfortunately they have to make do with what the factory provides them, this means less stream processors, lower clockspeeds, more voltage; and you end up with a product which requires a lot of power from your PSU to be able to grab the fastest single GPU title.

if you read through some of the better reviews, you'll find that some are also thinking that a refreshed design in 6-9 months will deliver on what Fermi promised originally; mostly thanks to refined process and better yields GTX 485/490 here we come

uh? how is that comparable? the design of Netburst was done with original plans to have a doubling of Mhz every x years, but due to silicon no longer being able to keep up with the design ( voltage 0/1 state causing too much issues) they had to either pump up the vcore, or drop CPU speeds as the next iteration had noticeably diminishing return.

how is the design of Fermi similar to that of Netburst?

You have to remember it's TWIMTBP game...
The way their products have gone in last year Nvidia seems to have used more money for dirty tricks squad than R&D.

Sure it's fastest single card... until you look whole when it's absurd fiasco:
Performance isn't earth shattering but power consumption sure is.
Competing chip isn't that dramatically slower and consumes under half as much and even better performing double card HD5970 consumes less. And you can even get those while without one shipload and few more of luck you might have to wait for Fermi to the end of the world and over because there aren't any proofs of chip ever making it to bigger production than demobatch meant for BS'ing people from buying from competitor who actually delivers.

This really reminds much about Intel's NetBurst architecture... Except that those CPUs were possible to manufacture in large quantities. (also Intel did plenty of dirty tricks to AMD then)

GTA 4 really loves Fermi
http://www.pcgameshardware.com/aid,7...views/?page=11