Hd 6870 vs gtx 470

Are you serious want to 3-way SLI GTX470?
A single GTX470 is still faster than a single HD6870, SLI is scaled better than CF, but going 3x GTX470 surely will produce a LOT amount of heat...
You can run 3x GTX470 with 1000W PSU...

im just thinking ahead

According to Guru3D... the HD6870 beats the GTX470 in most games.

http://www.guru3d.com/article/radeon-hd-6850-6870-revie...

So in a way, you can do HD6870 CF and be happy with. The 6xxx cards do scale a lot better now. Seems that ATI has improved their CF performances now. But even if you are looking at the future. There wont be any games in the next two years that would trouble a HD6870 CF and maybe by that time you would be willing to invest in something new.

6870 and 470 are similar in performance. But 470 overclocks better if you plan to do so. Also scaling 0f 68XX series CF is great. 58XX had issues scaling, but 68XX do not. In fact they scale better than SLI in some cases.

6870 consumes less power and produces less heat, while the 470 overclocks better.

3 way GTX 470 is not worth the price... 3x anything isnt. 2X a better GPU is much more worth it

I would prefer a single GPU setup over multi-GPU, simply because of the fact that many games do not scale very well with multiple GPUs.
Between the GTX 470 and HD 6870, the latter is the better choice considering reference cards.

6870 and 470 are very close in performance but the 6870 has other clear advantages (power, heat, better crossfire scaling).

You would only take the 470 if it was a good bit cheaper.

The big differences for me are that the 6870 is a lot quieter and has morphalogical AA (would be nice for those games which don't have AA support).

The 470 has PhysX. If you play Batman AA, Sacred 2 or one of the 20ish games that support GPU accelerated PhysX, it's a nice feature. However, they are noisy (I use 470's).

The GTX470 will have better DirectX 11 tesselation performance and PhysX. Getting one with a custom cooler, like the Gigabyte Superoverclock, will negate some of the concerns with heat and noise.

MLAA is way better than Physx so I don't really understand why any nVidia fans still keep bringing that up as an advantage.

The 6870 is the better card overall, by a long shot. It is also a current gen card while the 470 is outgoing generation.

get the 6870, unless you can get a 470 for a bit cheaper.

PhysX is supported by a very few number of games.It is not very useful in that sense.The 6800 series improved tessellation performance over the previous generation.

I'm not sure I'd call that a fan response. I usually say the same thing, even though I have 470's in SLI.

I own one game with GPU accelerated PhysX and I don't find it that much better than not having it. (Sacred 2) Your opinion may vary if you have a few of those 20ish games.

They are very similar performance, thats with the gtx 470@600mhz and users get them much higher.
They are a great deal, because they are now replaced with the 350 dollar gtx 570.
You have to balance the pro's , con's. Realize you have to pay more for the latest greatest and you can get deals on hardware on the way out.
The gtx 560 will perform right about/above the 6870/ gtx 470, imho (forecasting here) and will probably be about 279.99
We are now getting more performance for your dollar compared to 8 months ago.