It finally happened. NVIDIA has finally pulled back the curtain on its long-awaited GF100-based GeForce graphics card series. After numerous delays, the graphics card showed up more or less in the configuration that was rumored almost six months ago. Despite the wishes of some polarizing online reports, the graphics cards had better availability at launch than those offered by the competition (ATI) in November of 2009. That said, the NVIDIA GTX400 series is actually five months later than that that consumers would have. I wanted, and with five months to recover, the question remained: "Was it worth it?" The answer to such a question is not as clear as some would like it to be. Regardless of where you stand, it's obvious to everyone that the GTX480 is indeed the fastest single GPU we've seen to date. While it's not the fastest graphics card on the market, as that honor belongs to the competing Radeon HD5970 graphics card, boasting the fastest GPU ever produced is very important to NVIDIA. So much so that the company has stuffed a ridiculous number of ports into a core that's physically smaller than that of the 2006 G80 but much denser and more powerful per square millimeter. Exactly how many gates the GF100 houses will remain within NVIDIA's walls, but the number they are willing to publicly reveal on the GF100 core is 3.2 billion gates. This makes it the densest processing unit you can buy in any consumer-grade CPU or GPU. In fact, that makes it more than double the size of the already large GT200 core (1.4 billion) by a whopping 400 million gates, meaning you could put in a single 7800 GTX core and still have gates remaining, or you could almost build a full G80 GPU using the remaining card......half the card......coming soon, it's still a graphics card worth owning, especially if you want to play the latest games on the most advanced console settings enabled. The GTX480 is an excellent graphics card that offers maximum performance and is definitely worth the investment.Reviewer: Neo SibekoBenchmark ResultsHeaven Benchmark 2.1: 13413DMark Vantage: P172703DMark06: 22233Crysis Warhead 1920x1080: 68.77Resident Evil 5 1920x1080 4xAA 1 00: 0.7 fpsPremium : Hardware Score: 8/ 10 Bottom line: It may have been late, but NVIDIA has done it again by producing not only the largest but fastest GPU ever. Plus: Fast, very fast CUDA 3D-Vision Surround 4-Way SLIM Minus: Heat Very high power consumption Specifications :Core: 700 MHz GF100 (40nm) Processors: 480Rendering outputs: 40Memory: 1,536 MB GDDR5 (3,996 MHz) 177 GB/secAPI: DirectX11/OpenGL3.x, OpenCL 1.0, CUDA,PhysX