Did I miss the temp value? What is it? How long of a guarentee are they giving on this card for $600?

For $600 I would expect at least a 5yr guarentee, like the standard 5yr we get for TV's in UK now.

By standard I mean any shop that is not PC World/Dixons/Currys where they rip you off on a £70/year warranty service, wnakers! ;-)

Free 5yr guarentee at John Lewis, Costco and other retailers.

I don't understand... sure the drivers used to be a pile of crap 4 years ago, but not had any problems at all in recent times.

Both ATi and Nvidia can do non graphics processing on their cards (CUDA/OPENCL) sure ATi was a bit behind on this one.

I do agree you have to off your rocker to buy these stupidly expensive cards... I would rather wait unless you are the sort of people to boast they can play quake at 100,000 FPS or something...

@Fermi hopeful

Dont bother, its not around the corner, its white paper is less impressive than 5970 and its been presented as a computing platform??!! to world+dog(insert a Bruce Willis "Jeffrey Goens was a fruitcake" face from 12 monkeys) no word from Nvidia about any real game performance or even a comparison to the Hemlock.

@Fastest crashing

I am sorry, I forgot that last week the 198.12 "freezeware" has been updated to this weeks 198.78,and ZOMG what a massive difference!

Bottom line: I own the card myself and its absolutely 100% Kick-ass product (thanks Rodney)

disclaimer: I do own 8800GTX, 6800/5800Ultra and has been an nvidiot for most part of my PC building history.

Most the people that would buy such a card have more money then sence.. I am sure they would put a water cooling kit on if they have even the slightest idea about high performance PCs..

is because the first set of regulators is cooled by a metallic bar under the fan, instead of the vapor chamber. Anand had an article about this. They predicted that if there were a way to better cool that bank of regulators then each GPU could easily reach 5870 speeds.

admit it.

Yeah right, fastest card in 2009... IN CRASHING TO DESKTOP DUE TO CRAPPY CATALYST DRIVERS!!!

I doubt it, FERMI is due out any day now.

This review is a bit off base. First, GPU computing is not THAT important. Why? Because that effort is what caused ATI to easily overtake nVidia. nVidia focused too much of itself on CUDA when stunted their growth. Do we really want more of this? Second, full potential? WTF is that suppossed to mean? That you guys are greedy! That's what it means. The fastest isn't fast enough? You all are sick in the head. Last, getting rid of the "X2" name was stupid. It makes the market less able to be understood. P.S. $600 is and always will be too much to spend on a graphics card for gaming. Period.

Though, I do agree, it is a nice card.

She is no longer needed.

Her and the 8800GT can take a hike - I feel the need for REAL 3D speed!

But what I really want is the compiler that allows you to turn a CPU application into a GPU application just with recompilation, tuning and tweaking.

The card is artificially limited to the power constrains of PCIe regulations, ~300W of total power usage. The cooling can more than handle ~400W. Do you not read other sites?