I think this is (and will always be IMHO) the best RV770 review so far.
http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=3341&p=18
TBH, now that I know everything about RV770, I take my hat off. AMD has pulled ahead a winner this time. Not so much on the performance front given the specs, take into account they have multiplied SP and TMU numbers by 2,5x and in most cases they don't reach 1.8-2x the performance of RV670 (not that GT200 is doing any better though). But they have managed to do it extremely cheap. IMHO RV770 is nowhere near being a small chip at nerly 1 billion transistors, but they found the way to sell the cards at $200-$300 and that's quite an achievement for such a chip. I had my reservations because 800 SPs didn't fit well on the 800 million transistor count, in the end it is a lot bigger (and utterly the people who say 800 SPs on 800 million transistors was impossible to achieve were right, we were right
), but they managed to reduce the costs somehow and that's very impressive.
I have some concerns though:
1- The chip could have better performance-per-watt ratio, as the monolithic GT200 is better, AND is 65nm AND has 32 ROPs. The ROP count does affect the consumption, while is probably not offering better scores. By this I mean that an hypothetic 55nm GT200 with less ROPs could be way ahead on this front and AMD could gave fixed this better.
2- The chip itself consumes a lot, it even consumes more than 8800 GT SLI, while offering less overall performance. HD4870 CF's consumption is not so far from 9800 GX2 and GTX280 SLI's power consumption either, meaning that the X2 won't be as good a solution as it first could appear.
All in all the chip is impressive for the price segment, but it fails to impress me in the performance front when I look at the specs. Power consumption and heat are not very good neither, which it leaves me with the feeling that AMD is just playing very hard on prices with this one (as is doing with Phenoms), even risking profits, and that the card should be quite a bit more expensive to be as profitable as previous cards. AMD had to play this game, as for them gaining back the lost market share is vital in this moment, but I hope it doesn't bite them in the long term. That or I hope I am wrong in my assumption.
Either way the cards are marbles for us consumers. Let the price battle begin!