Final thoughts
We review the latest hardware with a view of advising you, dear reader, which hardware is worthy of consideration. NVIDIA recent soft launch of the two Fermi-based GPUs has given us a fuller picture on the options available in the discrete graphics market and how each card compares against one another.Looking at the high end of the market in particular, the Radeon HD 5850 makes a very strong case for best current GPU in the £200-£250 sector, helped by competing against two-year-old NVIDIA technology.
Bump up the graphics budget to £300 and the all-new GeForce GTX 470 and Radeon HD 5870 vie for your money, in the UK at least. Our pick right now would be the Radeon HD 5870, because it offers, on balance, more performance, lower power-draw and a quieter cooler.
The GeForce GTX 480 is due to hit etailers with a projected price of £450. The extra 50 per cent outlay isn't realised in linear performance gains and it can struggle to fend off Radeon HD 5870 in some cases. Go the whole nine yards and a £550 Radeon HD 5970 can be yours, offering the highest performance we've ever seen from a single card.
But you can spend £400-plus one more than just one card. Now answering the question on the first page, team two Radeon HD 5850s together, totalling the same £450 as a single GeForce GTX 480, and performance is significantly improved in our range of benchmarks. Indeed, we'd also question the need to spend the extra £100 on a HD 5970, if you have a CrossFire-compatible motherboard.
The GeForce GTX 480 isn't a bad GPU by any means, but its pricing brings a compelling dual-card solution from AMD into play. The sweet etail listing of Radeon HD 5850 and thoroughly decent scaling in CrossFireX means that it becomes even more difficult to make an objective case for the GeForce GTX 480 as a gaming card and, to a slightly lesser extent, the Radeon HD 5970.
NVIDIA will weigh in with arguments in favour of PhysX, SLI scaling, 3D Vision Surround, and a future-looking architecture. They're all valid to some degree, but, right now, they'd be more than offset by power/temperature/heat/noise concerns that are plaguing the GeForce 4x0 GPUs.
Bottom line: AMD's Radeon HD 5850 should continue to be a hot seller. It owns the sub-£250 space and a two-card setup is an alluring option that gives GeForce GTX 480 serious pause for thought. Got £500 to spend on a graphics? Buy two Radeon HD 5850s and a top gaming title.
We'll be conducting the same test with two GeForce GTX 470s in the very near future, compared against dual Radeon HD 5870s, amongst others, so stay tuned for that.
