When we got an overnight package from NVIDIA this past Friday we expected it to be a holiday gift like most of the other companies are doing right now. We've been loaded up with holiday cookies and greeting cards so far this month, so when we got the above package from NVIDIA it looked to be a holiday surprise. Once we opened up the package we found a holiday card and a welcome letter letting us know that we were given the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 570 reference card to review and that the official launch date was December 7th, 2010 at 6am PST. NVIDIA gave us just over three days to review the GeForce GTX 570; how nice of them. NVIDIA must guess that hardware reviewers do nothing over the weekend or they wanted to slip something past reviewers that they didn't want discovered. In our 'holiday gift box' we got a reviewer's guide, a GeForce GTX Tank T-Shirt: Collector's Edition and a single GeForce GTX 570 reference card. As many of our readers knew already, the new NVIDIA GeForce GTX 570 uses the same GF110 Fermi core that is found on the GTX 580 but it has a number of things disabled. If you look at the specifications chart below you'll see that the GeForce GTX 570 has fewer SMPs, CUDA Cores, Texture Units, ROP Units, GDDR5 memory and lower overall performance than the GeForce GTX 580.