NVIDIA's new GTX 280 cards are the fastest on the market today, period. Without a doubt the performance is really impressive, but the price is equally as high. When looking at this card purely from a performance/$ standpoint it is about the worst on the market today. However, some people want that performance, no matter the cost. Some people might even get three of them just to be number one in the benchmark competitions again. Even if you won't make number one you can still say you have a $2000 e-penis.
The high cost was to be expected though. A whooping 576 mm² die size will result in less chips per wafer and statistically the yields will also be lower. An additional cost factor is the 512-bit memory bus which requires a more complex PCB design than a traditional 256-bit bus. With this all-out design approach NVIDIA's new GTX 280 achieved amazing benchmark scores, because it does not suffer from the limitations that current multi-GPU designs have.
NVIDIA did a great job reducing the idle power consumption of their latest product, also the fan is quieter than other high-end cards. An extra plus that NVIDIA marketing emphasizes is that this card is for more than just gaming, you can do all sorts of calculations on the GPU and GPU accelerated PhysX will be available for these cards soon as well. However, at the moment personally I do not see the killer application for GPU accelerated computation yet, but a lot of developers will bring out creative software in the future to take advantage of that. Even though the card is too powerful for just a media PC, it offers HDMI+HDCP+Audio which is essential if you plan on gaming on your big TV screen.
In our other review today we tested the Zotac GTX 280 Amp! Edition which comes at higher clocks out of the box, but these higher clocks come at an extra cost. When comparing the two cards against each other price/performance wise the GTX 280 from Point of View comes out top - and overclocking is easy anyway for free extra performance. A very nice addition is also the included Assassin's Creed game which was released not long ago and is one of the hottest games at the moment.
Overall the GTX 280 is the fastest card money can buy you, and you will need a lot of money.