ATi's chips use MORE power than nVidia's, at least in the high end, nVidia's strat w/G7x was to counter R5xx with smaller dies and less heat (they run on less trannies, and make less heat, why do you think 7900GT uses the 6600GT cooler?)
as far as CPU's go, Conroe is a beast, and Intel has a quad core up their sleeves for ~Q1 2k7, at least they're supposed to, i've seen a few scarce screens of the Kentsfield quad-core, also, Intel's ES samples are usually fairly true to life reps of their chips, at least Cedar Mill and Presler where, OC'ing wise, the ES usually wins all the way, not because it's "hand picked primo silicon" but because it's a fully unlocked chip
imo ATI and AMD are fairly well suited to each other, both are used to being the #2 part, and being late on various features, or late on various claims (not saying Intel and nVidia (or 3dfx, or anyone else) has never missed a deadline or goofed on a part (Willamette, NV30, etc) but consider that Intel was the top dog in the 1990's, because AMD had nothing decent, K7 was designed by the people who brought us the Alpha (uses the EV6 bus and some other features) and K8 was built off of it, and ATI's products were terrible driver wise until 2002 (not saying they got much better post 2002, but they aren't XGI anymore))
