Looking back over the past year, Nvidia have had a tough ride. Firstly, they were late with the release of their high end GPU, resulting in AMD taking the golden opportunity to grab some much needed market share, and secondly their Fermi architecture became notorious for its high power consumption, temperatures and noise. The GF100 core was without a shadow of doubt the most powerful GPU available but in the form of the GTX480, it remained unappealing to most users. Furthermore, the GTX480 was a cut down version of core specifications, which seemingly wasn't enough to reduce all of its negative attributes. In its bid to take the performance crown, Nvidia had sacrificed user appeal. Fundamentally, Fermi is still a very successful architecture and we only have to look at its sheer compute power to realise that Nvidia have succeeded in producing what they set out to do despite the trade-offs.