The video card landscape has changed drastically over the past nine months. ATIreally has thrown down the gauntlet with it's HD 5xxx series cards that feature DirectX 11 support from the top to the bottom of the segment. At that point, Nvidia had nothing to compete with the 5970, much less the 5870 and 5850. The GTX 285 and 295 were good efforts, but still lacked DirectX 11 support. The green-faithful had to sit back and wait, as the Fermi bugs were worked out to bring the architecture to market. The wait allowed Nvidia to deliver a card that outperformed the HD 5870 with the GTX 480, and quickly took back the single GPU performance crown. The Inno3D GTX 470 on the other hand, is designed to compete with the HD 5850 and is what we will be looking at today. One of the drawbacks on most stock, high performance video cards, is the reference cooling solution. The GTX 470 is not immune to this criticism. To solve this problem, Inno3D has put together a card that incorporates a massive cooling solution to allow the card to run cooler, with less noise, to provide a better experience for the end user. This is a "Win-Win" situation. It helps prolong the lifespan of the card, while allowing the enthusiast the ability to bump the clock speeds up without fear of cooking what has already been shown to be a hot running chip. Lets see if the Hawk will to fly with the eagles, or roost with the chickens.