It finally happened. NVIDIA has finally pulled back the curtain on the long-awaited GF100-based series of GeForce graphics cards. After numerous delays, the graphics card has appeared more or less in the configuration that was rumored almost half a year ago. Despite the wishes of some polarizing articles online, the graphics cards had better availability at launch than what the competition (ATI) was offering in November 2009. That said, the NVIDIA GTX400 series is actually five months later than what the consumers would have had. wanted, and with five months to make up, the question remained: “Was the wait worth it?” The answer to such a question is not as clear as some might like. Regardless of where you stand, it's obvious to everyone that the GTX480 is indeed the fastest GPU we've seen to date. While it's not the fastest graphics card on the market, since that honor goes to the competition's Radeon HD5970 graphics card, being able to claim the fastest GPU ever produced is very important to NVIDIA. So much so that the company packed a ridiculous number of doors into a core that was physically smaller than the 2006 G80, but much denser and more powerful per square mm. The exact number of gates hosted by the GF100 will remain within NVIDIA's walls, but the number they are willing to publicly disclose about the GF100 core is 3.2 billion gates. This makes it the densest processing unit you can buy in any consumer CPU or GPU. In fact, that's more than twice the size of the already large GT200 core (1.4 billion) by 400 million gates, meaning you could fit a single 7800 GTX core in there and still have gates left over, or you could almost build a full G80 GPU using the rest of the middle of the paper......ort to come, it's still a graphics card worth owning, especially if you want to play the latest games with it most advanced settings enabled. The GTX480 is a great graphics card that delivers ultimate performance and is certainly worth the investment.Reviewer: Neo SibekoBenchmark resultsHeaven Benchmark 2.1: 13413DMark Vantage: P172703DMark06: 22233Crysis Warhead 1920 x 1080: 68.77Resident Evil 5 1920 x 1080 4xAA: 100 .7 f psAward: Hardware Score: 8/10In summary: it may have been late, but NVIDIA has done it again by producing not only the largest but the fastest GPU of all time. Plus: fast, very fast CUDA3D-Vision Surround4-Way SLIMinus: heat Very high power consumption Specifications: Core: 700 MHz GF100 (40 nm) Processors: 480 Rendering outputs: 40 Memory: 1536 MB GDDR5 (3996 MHz ) 177 GB/s API: DirectX11/OpenGL3.x, OpenCL 1.0, CUDA, PhysX