ATI's 38xx beat Nvidia in total cost of ownership

Well, the price difference between a handful of Watts isn't going to be a big factor, at least here in the US...The difference is what, like 40 Watts?

Here in Kentucky, electricity costs about 6 cents per kilowatt hour. That means, you'd be paying an extra .04 Watts *6 cents per hour, or .0024 cents each hour you're paying over what you'd pay for running the other card. You'll never make that up in the effective life of the card.

The power supply expense...well...that part is what truly sucks.

check this, the 3870 beats the 8800gts 640 on bioshock in an interesting way,
http://www.overclockersclub.com/re [...] 870/12.htm
i wonder wat causes this kind of performance

Sure... The 38xx is cheaper too run.... Until you overclock it, and pretty much everyone will want to since the 8800GT is better w00t! =D

Check this, 8800gts beats 3870 on Need for Speed in an interesting way. I wonder what causes this kind of performance?

I don't know. Both numbers represent anomalies. But they are part of the benchmark results, so until we find out what happened, we have to count them.

I didn't have time earlier, but I came back and looked more closely at the numbers. My first impression of the 3870 doing better overall at higher resolutions was wrong.
Quick and dirty chart:

ATI nVidia nv/ati% Avg% nv
FarCry 1024 232 247 +6.5
1280 179 188 +5.0 5.6
1680 132 139 +5.3

FEAR 1024 91 124 +36.3
1280 79 83 +5.1 11.3
1680 67 62 -7.5

COD2 1024 77 89 +15.6
1280 62 78 +25.8 23.0
1680 51 65 +27.5

Quake4 1024 74 80 +8.1
1280 62 71 +14.5 14.8
1680 46 56 +21.7

NfSMW 1024 80 82 +1.0
1280 82 78 +5.1 11.7
1680 62 80 +29.0

BioShk 1024 59 60 +1.7
1280 59 58 -1.0 -8.9
1680 56 44 -27.3

3dMark 1024 10609 10453 -1.5
1208 9789 9088 -7.8 -7.7
1680 9053 7964 -13.7 _____
16.6

On the average, the year old GTS is about 16% faster than ATI's latest and greatest. Like I said earlier, I wonder how the 8800GT would have done?

Apologies. The tabs got messed up when I pasted the chart into the tread editor.

I have both Nvidia and ATI cards JCS, Bought 7800 GT when it was top dog, bought the X1900xtx - still have both. Have a number of Quadro cards for my business.

Just because a number of home owners do not look at it business and industrial users DO look at it. That is where a lot of focus is done in corporate decision with Nvidia and ATI . They have to look at it. They have to look at their own cost also. It all comes into play whether you see it up close and personally or not. It does affect the products that we get.