You're missing very much the point of the product. The GM204 chip has been engineered to better the GTX680 part by X2. This is Nvidia moving with the times and creating the perfect platform for developing future GPU's. Some are moaning about it not being x% faster than a GTX780ti. You people need to go back to the lab and study up on physics. This card uses 2 billion less.... yes, 2 BILLION less transistors than 780ti. This card still performs higher than 780ti (though at stock clocks that might just be a frequency effect). That said, it overclocks to stupid levels - so far most reviewers are getting it to boost at 1400-1500Mhz. Cmon, ffs - that's insane. Even at those clocks it consumes less than a 780Ti and bests it by 20-25%.
This is a fantastic move. And if you really must bitch on about it not being so much more awesomely fantastic in performance - it's not the x10 chip, it's the x04 chip. To replace the 780/780ti chip you need the GM210 part. You'll get your jump in performance there but as folk have said, they'll sit on that and perfect it and wait for AMD to make their move.
If people are disappointed with the technical performance of this card, they really ought to get a grip on scientific reality.
All that said, I'll keep my 'relatively speaking' gas guzzling 780ti until the big maxwell comes out.
What matters in the end, unless you are paying some kind of absolutely absurd rate for your electricity, is performance. Performance/watt is a nice metric, but acting like end users should be impressed by that (as many reviewers are doing) is silly. There are only three times performance/watt matters:
1) You pay through the nose for electricity and see a meaningful difference in your monthly electricity bill by saving 100W or so of electricity (99.9% of people don't pay electricity rates this high)
or
2) Performance/watt is so bad that the card can't cope (too hot/loud... think GTX 480 / R9 290X)
or
3) You want to use multiple GPUs but have a small/midrange PSU and don't want to upgrade it
#1 applies to almost nobody, and #2 hasn't really applied to an Nvidia card since the 480, so all the fawning over performance/watt is overblown. #3 is the only real-world usefulness to this, I think - it's pretty epic that you could more or less go 980 SLI on a 650W power supply. But do you spend all your time when your PC is on obsessing over the readout of your Kill-A-Watt meter? No? I didn't think so. So let's talk more about performance and less about performance/watt.
And saying that the point of this product is to replace the GK104 cards is silly. They EOL'd the GK110 gaming cards; clearly this is seen as a replacement for them. And from a pure performance standpoint, it's unimpressive. ~10% better than previous gen. *Yawn* ... all the lavish praise being given to this card is unjustified. It's nice, but "the new 8800" this is not.
The 970, on the other hand, is a real home run at $330. Insanely good value there. But the 980 is very by-the-numbers "meh".
Call me when the real high end Maxwell gets here.
Also, that last line in the review is hilarious (and almost certainly accurate), but quite unprofessional. Are we back in grade school here? Disappointing, W1zzard.
