With a price of $700 this card will be way too expensive for most of the gamers today. However, there are people that are willing to dish out that amount of cash just to have the latest and greatest. Or even three of them for $2000... But given the die size and the 512-bit memory bus such a high price was to be expected. Also it is normal that NVIDIA will ask for a price premium, for a card that is the fastest graphics card available today. In our benchmarks we saw the GTX 280 beat everything that's on the market, even the NVIDIA 9800 GX2 which is a dual chip card. Unlike the GX2 the GTX 280 does not suffer from SLI's limitations and will run fast on all games, on all motherboards.
NVIDIA did a great job reducing the idle power consumption of their latest product, also the fan is quieter than all 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 calculations 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.
Zotac has successfully overclocked the GTX 280, the higher clocks out of the box can make about 6% difference on average, at 8% extra price though. Overall the GeForce GTX 280 is a revolution on the GPU market, offering unprecedented performance ... and price.