why do people care about power consumption when it comes to AMD but not Nvidia/ intel

[JGF111]

My days of big towers with 750+ watt power supplies are well over (probably on the wrong forum in hindsight... ). I've been using a beautiful, quiet mitx box (Node 304) with a 550 watt gold seasonic power supply for the last 4 years with a GTX980. I highly value an efficient power envelope while not forsaking performance which is why I've been in the nvidia camp since Maxwell. That's why AMD is not on my radar right now, they cede the high end performance AND power efficiency realms to nvidia.

 

[Marine-RX179]

I've this weird luck? with GPU prices - I don't think I've ever paid "full price" even close to or at launch for a GPU (aside from the 7950GX2).

I'm pretty sure the price you got the GTX470 for was during the same EOL pricing period with the 500 series arrived and there were some last EOL deals to be had such as the GTX480 at £199.99.

The problem is with the GTX470 was at launch it was same price as the HD5870, but slower and MUCH hotter and high power consumption. Overclocking the GTX470 did yield quite a lot of performance increase (around 20%), but it still put it at around same level as overclocked HD5870 level, but at the cost of even higher power consumption and temp (which the stock reference cooler cannot really cope with). If I recall correctly AIB customer cooler wasn't really that mainstream back then (with the exception of MSI with their Twin FrozR custom cooler and Zotac), so with the introduction of the Fermi cards it also led to the rise for the market of 3rd party graphic cooler for those that wanted to overclock and lower temp:
https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/accelero-xtreme-plus-v6000-vf3000,2784-4.html

The performance of the cards back in that gen was like GTX460 1GB <10% HD5850 = GTX 470 (stock) <10% HD5870 <10% GTX480 = GTX470/HD5870 (max overclocked) < 8~12% GTX480 (max overclocked). Still remember Nvidia's infamous Crysis 2 tessellated water underground across the whole map that's out of sight to make their cards looks perform much better than ATI's offering at the cost of hurting gaming performance Nvidia users as well (as they also get lower frame rate because of the pointless over-tessellation for things that were not even visible ).

 

[Rroff]

I'm pretty sure the price you got the GTX470 for was during the same EOL pricing period with the 500 series arrived and there were some last EOL deals to be had such as the GTX480 at £199.99.

The problem is with the GTX470 was at launch it was same price as the HD5870, but slower and MUCH hotter and high power consumption. Overclocking the GTX470 did yield quite a lot of performance increase (around 20%), but it still put it at around same level as overclocked HD5870 level, but at the cost of even higher power consumption and temp (which the stock reference cooler cannot really cope with). If I recall correctly AIB customer cooler wasn't really that mainstream back then (with the exception of MSI with their Twin FrozR custom cooler and Zotac), so with the introduction of the Fermi cards it also led to the rise for the market of 3rd party graphic cooler for those that wanted to overclock and lower temp:
https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/accelero-xtreme-plus-v6000-vf3000,2784-4.html

The performance of the cards back in that gen was like GTX460 1GB <10% HD5850 = GTX 470 (stock) <10% HD5870 <10% GTX480 = GTX470/HD5870 (max overclocked) < 8~12% GTX480 (max overclocked). Still remember Nvidia's infamous Crysis 2 tessellated water underground across the whole map that's out of sight to make their cards looks perform much better than ATI's offering at the cost of hurting gaming performance Nvidia users as well (as they also get lower frame rate because of the pointless over-tessellation for things that were not even visible ).

I only bought one of them at EOL prices IIRC one was Nov the rest were around launch (there was about a week IIRC around 2-3 weeks after launch where the prices on the 470 dropped a lot before going back up again). I'm not sure off the top of my head what the 5870 was like temperature wise but the 470s (for obvious reasons) were massively underclocked out the box and ran OK for temperatures - IIRC I had to turn the clocks up to around 850MHz (stock 607) before they breached 70C under heavy load. Where things got pretty sketchy on the stock cooler was using the mod to run 1.1V and 900MHz.

 

[jigger]

My GTX780ti was a very hot running and a pretty loud card too. Hotter than my R9 290.