I don't remember worrying much about the HD2900's running hot, I believe my issues with them were that they were overpriced. I've always gone with the best bang for the buck. I'll be the first one to point out the problems with the GTX480 also, in fact I did later on down in the post. However, again, my buying decision almost always goes with bang for the buck, and that is pretty much what I am always concerned with.
For someone that just a few posts back went on about people not calling you an ATi fan boy because you've own nVidia cards too...you sure are quick to do the exact same thing to others...
Did you happen to look at what card is currently in my main rig? An HD4890. Guess what card was in Rig4 before the 8800GTS...and x800xl(bought here from Xazax), and before that was an x1950Pro(sold to Crashnburnxp). I've also had an x1900GT(bought from Blacktruckryder), which was replaced with an HD3850(bought from Xazax), which was replaced by an HD4670(sold to 3dsage), which was now replaced by the HD4890. I just purchased an HD4870x2 off miahallen. About the only series I haven't personally owned a card from was the HD2000 series, which I skipped, and to be fair, I skipped the G80 series also, I wasn't interested in either as both didn't offer enough gains over the cards I currently had to justify the price. The only reason I have a G80 card now is because I got a good deal on it, and I wanted it to replace the x800xl so I could use the machine to fold.
No, the GTX480 doesn't make sense. However, as I already said, the GTX470 is actually looking promising. Granted, I won't totally believe that until we see a W1z review on it, but from the other reviews it is looking promising. It doesn't use an extreme amount of power like the GTX480(so no worry about killing power supplies), it does still get hot but it uses a much weaker heatsink and fan than the GTX480 also. The heat output is only about 60w more than the HD5870, which actually does an amazing job in heat and power usage. However, the interesting thing is that the GTX470's heat output and power usage is very much inline with my current HD4890 and GTX285, and it is actually very similar to the GTX280. I don't need to worry about water-cooling my CPU with those cards, so I'm not worried about it with the GTX470. I think most, including you, seem to be caught up on the GTX480 and applying the problems it has with GTX470. However, it is pretty obvious that nVidia really pushed that card to make it one hell of a beast so it would beat the HD5870 hands down, while the scaled back GTX470 is actually a reasonable card. T
he HD5870 is better in heat and power, but the GTX470 certainly isn't unreasonable, it compares rather nicely to the high end cards of the last generation actually, the HD5870 has just sets an extremly high bar.
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