Introduction

We've waited months for it and for that reason the rumor mill on a single graphics card has never been so great. We've heard everything from flat out lies to things that have come true. Today, however, everything you think you know about the GTX 400 series doesn't matter, because today you'll find out the truth!

While our GTX 480 might be running a little late, our GTX 470 arrived with bells on in the early hours of Monday the 22nd of March. Only hours afterwards, that one great parcel was followed by another carrying our new Gulftown CPU.

The next few days were going to be all about self control; holding myself back from testing the GTX 470 and instead building up a catalogue of video cards to compare it against.

With our CPU installed and clocked to 4.2GHz, it was time to test the HD 5970. Once completed, we moved down the ladder, HD 5870 and HD 5850. As for NVIDIA cards, the only one floating around these days was the GTX 285, so that got tested as well.

With days spent testing these current and older cards finally complete, it was time to slide the GTX 470 ever so gently into the testbed and hope that it powered up. All was well and the card fired up straight away. From there we had only one thing to do; benchmark that bad boy! - Let's quickly look at the card and get into the numbers that we want to know.