And it seems to be eating the competition some tests have it within 4% of the NV 590 as a single chip card that makes it stupidly fast... it's on average 20% faster than the 580 too apparently

ocp's review

Only 1100 USD for Crossfire of these, sign me up!

Honestly though, looks like a good card. Hopefully we'll see them hit 125-175 USD range in the next 12-18 months.

The idle power consumption and temps are crazy good to boot. However much AMD failed with the new processor, they at least scored with this card. However I'm more interested in the mid range £120-£200 cards since I'm about ready to upgrade my 5000 series card.

Waiting with baited breath. :)

That's more or less what I keep saying - by the time it's actually useful it's a fraction of the price.

Well, it is useful now, but two of them will be more useful 12 months down the road for less than the cost of a single one now. If you're doing CAD work (or similar) a lot of people are saying these beat the shit out of workstation cards for a fraction of the price, so they're probably worth it now. If you just game, yeah, whatever is in the 125-175 price range (Crossfired or SLIed if you want to get crazy) is going to be as much as you need. I almost wonder if buying ATI has saved AMD from their terrible CPU track record of the last few years.

Well yeah okay, for 3D design, but I think you know I was referring to gaming. :P

I did, sometimes I can't resist being pedantic, you know me:)

With Bulldozer and Win 7 not coexisting in full harmony, we will have to wait a bit before anyone can answer that question. Maybe until MS manages to get its patches right, maybe until it issues Win 8.

I have an E450 based netbook. Not bad at all. And an A8 APU based laptop. Acceptable performance for a very affordable price. But AMD still competes better on these entry / middle range segments than on the upper categories.

The first generation of Bulldozer hasn't delivered up to expectations ( and it's partly due to wrong choices made by AMD, although part of the poor performance actually stems from the MS windows issue and from benchmarking software being as fair and unbiased as rating agencies )

Well for the average consumer it probably doesn't matter but I've always thought the enthusiast markets and work markets drove the new research at Intel and AMD. Buying an AMD for software development right now would be a waste of dollars compared to the performance. For surfing the web and "normal" people, whatever is on sale at Dell Outlet is just fine. I don't think they honestly care what's in their computer.

Same here, I have an A8 APU on my laptop, with no graphic card. It's surprisingly good. It's quite cheap, it has low temperatures and a long autonomy. Good move from AMD.

I have an E-350 based laptop and I firmly believe that the APU is the way of the future. It's just a shame that AMD didn't get it right with Bulldozer. I see people speculating about AMD giving up on it, and I don't see it. Their GPUs are quite good ATM and I firmly believe that as OpenCL starts to take hold that things will start to work better.

That being said, for basic day to day use my E-350 is more than enough for most tasks.

I agree with that notion, they have have three successful product lines (4000, 5000, 6000 series) which have sold bucket loads, and of course fusion. This combined took the focus off of the CPU woes and AMD sure have benefited in many ways from it.

I really hope the ATI side gets to have more control of processors soon, since they have clearly showed themselves capable through fusion.

AMD has to get their act together on the manufacturing side, regardless of what they do right or wrong in the processor business. Right now, what they have is that Charlie Foxtrot called GlobalFoundries, consisting of the duck-taped together entities who f***ed up the Phenom launch, the Phenom II launch, the 6000 launch, and the Bulldozer launch.

They still have to prove they can produce their high-end products at yields and rates that will meet demand, rather than force their customers to endure system-breaking bugs, yield-managed streams of seconds, and old product relabeled as new.

While ATI may be a big help on the design side, they are no help at all on the manufacturing side, as ATI, the original fabless chipmaker, brought no manufacturing facilities or expertise.

Do you guys think I will be bottlenecked if I paired one of these up with an OC'd Phenom II X4? I don't want to make the jump if it means I'll be getting anything less than full performance value.

Games are mostly single threaded so pretty much all cards are CPU limited nowadays...