Although one of the better cards I have owned, my 4870X2 at last wasn't meeting my own personal expectations, so when I saw the non reference Gigabyte SOC 480 on sale I couldn't say no to such a drastic price reduction, I think it was slashed to around half price.
The performance when AA is applied is very impressive, with better minimum and average frame rates (and quite often maximum fps as well), and has as good if not better IQ in game than my old Radeon had, which perhaps is to be expected even with considering the subjectivity of this particular aspect.
So, it is without a doubt the best card I have owned, and I will look forward to letting it stretch its legs a little more with a Sandy Bridge or Ivy Bridge upgrade. I am more likely to stick with a single gpu for a while to come, (I don't intend to start going down the road of increasing my resolution and then having no choice but to require two or three gpu's to support the higher res adequately), but if I did dabble in dual gpu again I would go SLI since I haven't tried that yet; two gpu's @ 1920x1200 is not overkill imo. Had it not been a non reference design then I probably would have gone for the 560 2gb, if not maybe a 6950 with a view to crossfiring soon after.
It's been a nice change to try out the green team which I think has made the upgrade refreshing for me, it has been a long time since I've experienced that 'wow' factor when upgrading a gpu. So many of my previous gpu's have been Radeons so it was certainly time for a change to keep things varied and interesting. So yeah, I think I made a good decision for a number of reasons.
Thank goodness it handles the Stalker series at maximum, AMD / ATi cards seem to love those titles, and the last nVidia card I had (admittedly a while ago) couldn't even play the first title well at all. I'm not even sure if I had modded SOC, but god it ran like a dog.
, not as fast frame rate wise in my system compair to my 6970 (now crossfired) but some games seem smoother on the gtx480 than on the 6970's.
