Nvidia GTX 480 or 570?

Get the 570 for the reduced heat and power consumption. Performance is similar.

crossfire a pair of 6870s, beats both of them.

erm... well yes however it gonna cost another £100.00. Got for it definately if you've got the budget!  

OPs said they are only considering Nvidia cards.

You're not going to recover the power consumption difference for years. Go with the 480 since they are just as fast and it's cheaper.

For $300 you can get 2 GTX 460s which is as fast as a GTX 580:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E168...

GTX570 gets my vote....!

GTX 570. Noise, power consumption, and heat are all lower with on par performance. I love mine.

Without a doubt spend a little extra for the newer card.

GeForce GTX 570 (Fermi) 1280MB 320-bit GDDR5 PCI Express 2.0 x16
HDCP Ready SLI Support Video Card

The 480 is too noisy. The 570 on the other hand is very quiet.

If it's not too late for your decision, I just returned a 570 and got a 480.

The 570 was getting "display adapter" errors/recoverys on a regular basis near the end of the day, eventually crashing. Perhaps it was just a bad unit, but some web research suggests the 570 has a higher rate of problems (anecdotal, hardly scientific). So for me it was a choice between going back to 480 or springing for a 580.

Performance seems almost identical

If the 480 is any noisier, I can't tell.

Yes, it does run hotter, but still stays well within tolerances. And if the 570 is going to crash when it gets just a little warm, give me the one that runs ok, if hot.

And 480 was a bit cheaper (though not as much as I'd've thought, which also makes me wonder...).

im pretty sure it was your unit - i have yet to hear of such deal breaking circumstances with the 570

^+1

570 i say also. 480 is old tech.

IMHO the 400 series was just an attempt by nvidia to rush out fermi no sooner it was released to compete with amd as soon as possible.The gtx 460 was the only card worth getting in the 400 series.They corrected their bugs in the architecture and released the 500 series which is a much more stable,has lower noise and power consumption.BTW the gtx 570 is actually slightly more powerful than the 480.Its a no brainer.Go for the 570

i believe that when people are talking about the 570 having more power, i think they are talking about the fps/performance results , not actual hardware. all of the 5xx series cards run DX11 features better also than the 4xx series

The 480 has more RAM. If you can find one with custom cooling like the Gigabyte SOC, that is a great reason to own a GTX 480.

those technical specifications are irrelevant to actual real world performance.The 570 is actually 3% faster

Get the 570 for the reduced heat and power consumption. Performance is similar.