Quote Originally Posted by tajoh111 View Post
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.
Honestly it sounds like almost everything Charlie said about Fermi has been wrong, with the exception of silicon revisions and release timeframe. He has said 5% faster than the 5870, castrated to 448 SPs for the top bin GPU with 600/1200 (core/sp) clocks, 300W TDP, 70C at idle while running at 70% fan speed, etc... All of that seems to be nowhere near reality.