This is not too impressive.

Fermi 480 top model and Fermi 470 will go on sale end of March beginning of April.

The 480 has a nice price tag of 699.99

While ATI 5890 is 389.99


not good nVidia,, not good at all. I need to sell a body part to afford this lol

the ATI 5870 is $400 while nVidia GTX 470 will be $500 and the ATI 5970 is $700 and the nVidia GTX 480 will be $700. you really shouldn't complain about prices. lets just wait until we have some trustworthy bench marks

benchmarks aside... i can't justify spending over $300 on a single graphics card no matter how amazing they are. the only good thing about the new nvidia GPUs being released in my eyes is the price on HD5870s will come down... and even then i'm still one the fence about upgrading.

there is a thread in the news section about this i believe...

This reading should give you some ideas (perhaps as it explains delays as well as increase in overall R&D cost).

Initially NVIDIA ran into a can of worms with the A1 revision of GF100 (Fermi), yields have had to be incredibly horrible as they very quickly shifted to revision (build) A2 of the ASIC. After revision A2 was out some time passed and TSMC reported that the majority of their 40nm issues had been solved. Good proof of that is that ATI is pushing out many DX11 class products in much diversity and reasonable volume. That means the wafer yields though likely not very good where okay enough. So there's something else going on as well next to yield issues. Either a bug slipped in or the thermal package is causing issues resulting in lower than anticipated clock frequencies and perhaps heat related issues.

We found out (and verified), surprisingly enough, that the GPU is already at revision A3, that's the third revision of the GPU, the GF100 already has had three builds. So yes, something was wrong, very wrong alongside the initial yield issues. But we know that the products right now are in volume production, will it be many weeks before we see good availability ? Sure it will. Maybe April, or indeed May is where things will start to make a difference. Performance will be very good, however with the clocks I have seen (and only if they are final) I do believe they will not be brilliant though. NVIDIA has many trump cards though, they have an outstanding driver team which will drive performance upwards fast and soon.

So because nvidia f'ed up not once, but twice, the consumer must ultimately pay? Sounds like nvidia is just trying to make more profit to cover up their lousy bug-riddled mistakes. Makes perfect sense...

The consumer always pays.
I think the gist of what's happening is that the useable yield from the process is so small that production is going to be limited. Smaller production run will mean that demand for the few available parts will probably be higher.
I don't know how long you've been around tech, but I can recall very similar situation occuring with the X800 series "Platinum Edition" (PE) cards. We also had single manufacturer superiority when ATI's HD2900 series was delayed repeatedly at the same time the 8800GTX became king of the hill. Likewise if Intel hadn't canned Larrabee then consumers might be getting a better deal.
I'm personally not planning on buying either first gen DX11 cards, a little eye-candy from a handful of games isn't worth my cash at present. But if paying an extortionate amount for the nVidia card (assuming you could buy one) is abhorrent then buying a HD5850 or a couple of salvage part HD5830's (if a 350 watt power draw isn't a drawback) for Crossfire might be an alternative.

anyone come across this guys take yet?

http://www.guru3d.com/article/nvidia-geforce-470-480/

I think that's where Archean's quote comes from.
Hilbert's site and his testing regime are usually spot on- the guy just loves tech, and I've found he usually hit's the mark more often than not. Well balanced articles with a certain exuberance-which is why he has a good following.
Unfortunately, just like most of the tech scribes that are taking a "let the hardware do the talking" approach, Hilbert seems to be copping some flak from the ATI roving fanboy brigade (aka Charlie's Angels) for being one of nVidia's paid stooges. Seems like SA's forum members are attempting a full FUD campaign in Chas's honour. Note the links back to CD's articles from "Guests" and members who post 2-3 times a year in order to get page hits for SA- of course inspired by the admins there gushing over their new "membership" and page views. Note that this site is being similarly targeted. Pretty piss-poor way to run a business IMO.

I totally agree, there are some sites where writers/commentators simply doesn't show objectivity disregarding bias towards any particular hardware Co. DBZ's excellent comment with regard to X800 series & Larrabee, also have implied meaning i.e. R&D is no cheap business in any industry, even after spending tons of money sometimes there is no guarantee that it will work in the real world (or one may end up with an egg in the face.).