Power consumption is piss poor. Its pretty hard to ignore, I don't know how they can consume so much power with a single chip. Powerwise this is as much of a disaster as the pentiumr 4 D editions. These things look like they are going to bench like barncats under LN2, if they are still clocking 15% very warm conditions.

This generation the 5850 is the card to get for price to performance and watt.

The delta between the the 5850 and the 5870 is smaller than the delta between the 5870 and Fermi. Considering pricing, the 5850 has a 120 price difference compared to fermi and the 5870 100 dollar price difference. If you don't mind Cf solutions, the 5850 is a combo pretty hard to ignore if you want to spend about 550 dollars.

I can't believe people are dismissing driver potential here, atleast team Red fan. This card is brand spanking new architecture and it shows with the up and down performance. The current drivers are so specialized for the gtx 28x - g80 its not even funny. The very same people that were saying 5870 didn't perform that well at launch because of drivers are the same ones dismissing fermi driver potential.

The fact is fermi biggest improvements are in games that they performed poorly in prior generations in the past which shows how new the architecture is. Considering that these chips have only had 4 months for driver development, I think it unreasonable to think fermi won't pick up big driver gains in the future.

I agree with you annihilator that future driver improvements should never be part of the purchasing equation. None the less, I think its impossible for fermi not to pick up huge jumps in the future.