Rumour: Two GeForce GTX 460s planned?

There have been plenty of rumours circling about Nvidia's next Fermi card, codenamed GF104 and supposedly set to be called GeForce GTX 460. We've rounded up the best from our sources here in Taiwan.

Firstly - a couple of manufacturers told us about the GTX 460 during Computex, and we reported:

• 8.5 inches long (Radeon HD 5770 length)
  
• 192-bit memory interface
  
• 768MB GDDR5 memory
  
• Early-mid July availability
  
• 180W TDP

Fudzilla recently expanded on this with reports of not one but two GTX 460s:

• One with 1GB of GDDR5 memory and a 256-bit interface
  
• Another with 768MB of GDDR5 and 192-bit interface
  
• Possible GTS nomenclature on other GF104 parts

They also reported that the chip would be a "good overclocker" which is similar to what we heard at Computex as well. It has been mulled that this is because the GF104 drops the large L2 cache seen on previous Fermi GPUs.

Chinese website Expreview then claimed to have screenshots of the Nvidia drivers with the specs listed as follows:

• 336 Stream processors
  
• 675MHz core clock,
  
• 1,350MHz shader clock,
  
• 768MB of GDDR5 memory
  
• 1,800MHz (3,600MHz effective) memory frequency
  
• 192-bit memory interface
  
• 150W TDP

This was also confirmed by Fudzilla, which mulled the shader block granularity had changed from 32 to 24, making their claim of to two GTX 460 cards work if the "full" GF104 has:

• 16 blocks of 24 shaders giving 384 SPs and a 256-bit memory interface

While the "crippled" (their words, not ours) GF104 has:

• 14 blocks of 24 shaders giving 336 SPs and a 192-bit memory interface

Expreview also posted photos from yet another Chinese website showing a rectangular GF104 branded die shot, with aluminium heatspreader stating A1 silicon.

The launch date being thrown around right now is Monday 12th of July, just under a month away, which means the cards should already be on a boat out of the Chinese factories in order to reach retailers in time for that date.

Is Nvidia planning to replace the GeForce GTX 470 - or even GTX 465 - already? Or is Nvidia repeating the GTX 260 situation, where it had two versions of a very similar card? Let us know your thoughts, in the forums.