Two stories doing the rounds strongly indicate that Nvidia is preparing a new range of graphics cards, and will probably launch them soon.
VR-Zone has been practicing its Chinese and has gathered some shots and details of the new card from the
PCInLife forums. Meanwhile,
Tech Connect Magazine reports that the GeForce GTX 580 is mentioned explicitly in a new developer driver that was released on 27 October, plus seven other new or unknown products.
Unfortunately Chrome’s translation of the PCInLife forum thread is utter garbage, so we’ll have to rely on VR-Zone when it says that, ‘
At first glance, the GTX 580 looks much more like the GTX 470 than the GTX 480. It features similar contours to the GTX 470, but is longer and features a larger fan.’ This is much more helpful than the ‘
580 to the power of hope, long time useless N card, like a change of taste’ comment that Chrome believes lit_pclife made.
Using our own eyes, we can at least say that card doesn’t sport the same exposed heatsink cooler design of the GeForce GTX 480 1.5GB. Using our fingers, we can also say that the card looks long – the length between a graphics card’s backplate and the end of the 16x PCI-E connector is 145mm, and the GTX 580 looks to be twice that length. The PCB of a GTX 480 is 270mm (10.5in) long, while the GTX 580 looks like it’ll be 290mm (11.5in) long – we’re not sure that’ll fit in our Antec Twelve Hundred graphics test PC case!
The card features the usual display output of a GeForce 400 card – an HDMI and two DVI ports – so we’re not expecting the card to do any three-screen gaming without help.
While the GeForce 500 series could well just be an updated GF100 GPU with all the stream processors enabled and some extra clock speed, those tweaks alone could make it 30 per cent faster than a GTX 480 1.5GB. This could well be enough to give ATI’s forthcoming Radeon HD 6900 cards a serious challenge in the performance stakes. While the longer PCB will allow Nvidia to fit a larger heatsink, it remains to be seen whether the reference GTX 580 cooler will avoid the problems of noise and heat build up that plagues the reference GTX 480 1.5GB cooler. At least the GTX 580 doesn’t use two 8-pin PCI-E power connectors, but it does keep the 8-pin and 6-pin power input configuration of the GTX 480 1.5GB.
Do you think the GTX 580 looks like a Radeon killer, and do you care if it’s an updated GF100 as long as it performs well? Leave your thoughts in
the forums.
Via
The Tech Report.
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