14 DAY TRIAL // Has anyone ever searched to acquire a computer product that hasn't even been officially released? Well, the most probable answer is "No," but it appears that a couple of online retailers have actually listed NVIDIA's yet-to-be released GTX 280 graphics card among their products. Although the price tag is rather high and you won't even get to see a picture of the card before you buy it, there is one retailer that intends to be the first to sell such a card.
The card, which is listed at this site, is one of ASUS' implementations and is dubbed ENGTX280/HTDP/1G GTX280. We can't say for certain if this is one of ASUS' marketing strategies or just a fluke on behalf of the retailer in question, but it seems users can acquire this card for ?574,94. Naturally, the price tag is rather high but, if we consider that you will be purchasing a graphics card that no other friend of yours can obtain, maybe the price is justifiable in the end. Still, although this retailer doesn't give out any technical specs of the card, we can at least say it will come with 1 GB of GDDR3 memory and two DVI ports.
Maybe we just have to wait a bit more, until a product picture is available - if we?re lucky, this might even happen before the official release. And, because we are so curious by nature, we even found another website that has listed this ASUS graphics card. However, this one provides, instead of a price tag, the technical specifications of the card. And it looks like the GTX280 is going to come with a graphics core clocked at 600MHz, a total of 240 stream processors and with a standard clocked memory of 2200MHz. Although this site too fails to offer a clear picture of the card, it does specify that it will come with an active cooling system, which should give a general idea about how the card is going to look.
Until the GTX280 becomes official, we will definitely have something to ponder over. I'm not referring only to the high price tag, but also to whether NVIDIA's new product will be worth upgrading to, especially since there is yet no competitor to the company's current GeForce lineup on matters of performance.
Update: Unfortunately, soon after this article was written, the above mentioned retailer pulled down the graphics card from its web site. This answers one question though, namely that the listing of the graphics card was a fluke on the part of the retailer. At the moment, there is still one more German website that needs to pull the graphics card down from its pages.