Power consumption is stupidly high those. The performance per watt is the same as the last generation. This cards needs a refresh badly.

Maybe because I set my expectations so low because of Charlie and Saaya who has tended to agree with Charlie lately, but I am really getting excited about these supposed numbers(7%). I said clocks were going to be around 700mhz with around 20% performance advantage, both which were said to be optimistic. Well the clocks are 700mhz, lets see if we can get 20% or greater for performance when the reviews come out. Chiphell this close to the release date tends to be accurate those.

Still when I compare it to my initial expectations of fermi when the specs were first released in october, I was expecting bigger gains. But a loss in shaders by 6 percent and drop in frequency another 14 percent(shaders were initially supposed to be 1600mhz), still make these results disappointing from what they could have been.

20% is a important number because its too big of a gap for AMD to close with a refresh, in addition its bigger than the gap the gtx 280 had over the 4870. 20% would also solidly justify the 100 dollar price difference.

Still those power consumption appears to suck badly and I can imagine a lot of heat. Too bad winter is near over and spring is coming, which can almost be said the same for Nvidia if they can deliver this launch.