Tech's Home: Computer hardware video reviews, Tech news, Reviews, and Technology live shows.

Nvidia has officially announced that its new DirectX 11 graphics cards will hit retail stores in the week of April 12th. Review sites have already got their hands on them, though, and these new cards have been the new topic around the whole internet. I wanted to express my opinions on these new cards. This might also act like a mini preview of the cards .

First off, I would like to start with the new announcements, for those of you who might not know them yet. Nvidia has released two new DirectX 11 graphics cards: the GTX 480 and the GTX 470. The GTX 480 competes directly with AMD's Radeon HD 5870, and the GTX 470 competes directly with the AMD Radeon HD 5850. Reviews on both of these cards have been released at numerous places around the internet.

Generally, the benchmarks show that these cards are faster than their AMD counterparts. In most games the FPS the Nvidia cards provided were a bit higher than what the AMD cards could pull off, but in some cases, the AMD cards performed better. AMD still holds the fastest-card title, which is the Radeon HD 5970. I had previously thought that the Nvidia cards were supposed to completely destroy the AMD cards in terms of performance, according to words from Nvidia. This, however, clearly wasn't the case.

These new cards also have a major draw back, which is the price. The GTX 480 will come in at $500, while the GTX 470 will come in at $350. Currently, the AMD Radeon HD 5870 sits at $400, and the 5850 at $300. The GTX 480 will cost $100 more than the HD 5870, and the GTX 470 will cost $50 more than the HD 5850.

Lastly, the power consumption of the two new Nvidia cards were considerably higher than what the AMD cards used up. The Nvidia GeForce GTX 480 used up more power than the HD 5970, and much more than the HD 5870. Mostly the same goes for the GTX 470: while it consumed less power than the dual-GPU HD 5970, it still consumed more than both the HD 5870, and the HD 5850. Temperature had mostly the same trend as the power consumption; since most of the time, the more power a card needs, the hotter it gets. Testing showed that the new GTX 480 and GTX 470 were hotter than the HD 5850, the HD 5870, and the HD 5970. Noise is all tied in to this, and both of the Nvidia cards, as expected, were louder than all AMD 5800 series video card.

Now, my opinions on these new cards. First of all I would like to say that I am in no way associated with any of these companies, and have owned products made by both of them in the past. It is clear that now, Nvidia holds the crown for the fastest single-GPU card. To me, however, I still think the AMD cards are the better buy.

The cards do provide a performance increase, but at costs. First, is the price. These new cards are more expensive than their AMD counter parts. I think the performance increases are not worth that much extra money; we'll have to wait, though: active competition in the market may lower prices. The Nvidia GTX 480 provides about 12% more performance than the HD 5870. The GTX 470 provides about 5% more performance than the HD 5850. The choice is yours to make.

The temperature, power, and noise are all much worse on the Nvidia cards than on the AMD ones. In most cases, all the HD 5800 series cards beat the Nvidia cards by a considerable margin. This ultimately means that you may need a higher wattage power supply to run the new Nvidia cards. You may need more case fans and better cooling solutions for the Nvidia cards. And the Nvidia cards will be louder than the AMD cards.

Eyefinity allows you to run up to three displays from one graphics card. This feature is only available to AMD 5000 series video cards. Nvidia has created a similar type of feature for their new cards: Nvidia Surround. This new feature hasn't been released yet, but people say it will need more than one graphics card in order to run. Again, another win for the AMD side.

So there it is. I was very happy to hear that these new cards were released. Active competition in the market could mean ultimately lower prices for the end consumer. You have to keep in mind, however, that these new cards were released a whopping six months after the AMD ones were released, and they weren't exactly what I had expected.