So you run your card at 75% all the time? From all the reviews the 5970 is the better choice. It has more potential and takes less watts while producing less heat. Fermi is good at heavy tesalation but is medicore with everything else. In DX10 games the 5870 beats it and the 5970 gets about 30% more FPS. In DX11 game fermi is 5 to 10% faster than a 5870 and still falls short to a 5970.
Not really. 5970 is a Dual gpu and reviews states that the card has micro-stuttering etc whilst i've not seen a single stuttering on my GTX 480 now. GTX 480 is a single GPU and is so close, and even better than 5970 in some tesselation-instances. I for instance could run Metro 2033 very high, DX11, 1080p with 2xMSAA, DOS, and 16xAF (didn't really see much difference with AF ON and OFF so i might disable it later) without any problem. average fps was 45-50, min 34-36. Two of these in sli is a good choice what so ever you may say. Like i've said earlier, it's up to each and other what their preferences are and do not try to standardise 5970 becasue it's not ALL that good to be a dual gpu. Less watttage sure, but not less heat. MY 480 temps are in most cases was less than what i've seen in reviews, yet i lost much respect from reviewers after seing the truth yesterday.
Correction: GTX 480 beats 5870 in all DX10 games with the exeption of Aliens VS predators. on average 5-10% which isn't that much. Yet, in DX11 games i saw 20% increase in Just cause 2 compared to the 5870 benches. Overclocked i saw even more, so keep that in mind. This is something i see right in front of me btw.
In heaven i saw over 100% increase over 5870 when i used Extreme-tesselation mode and got an average fps of 40, which is better than 5970! On Normal mode i got 60.3 fps the first round and 65 the second. So this SINGLE GPU-card is surperior to 5870. Also, let's talk about Physx. I saw some nice boost there, in crysis i could max the game with VERY high, 1080p, 4xAA and have average 55-58 fps in single player (thus this seemed to vary a lot but never went below 39, unless when the auto save appeared) and over 80 in multiplayer on aveage.
Yet, i've proven the reviewers wrong. The 75% noise was less than my GTX 275 on 60% which is a big plus. Yet, 100% was very noisy and something i just can't use unless i want to test the max OC on air.
Ask me if you want to know anything because i have the card now. I see that it needs some drivers here'n there but it's a living beast!
Well, his choice. And maybe it's just brand loyalty.
Also, what are the max temps???
Max temps i saw after playing Metro 2033 for 6 hours active playing plus 2 hours just being idle in-game (that's 8 hours) was 72c overclocked from 700 core, 1401 Shader, 1848 Memory. To a huge Core 810MHz, Shader 1621MHz, Memory 4000MHz.

Took 30 sec to coold down to 33-35c after exiting.