14 DAY TRIAL // According to the latest news on the web, EVGA has recently released its 55nm GTX 260 graphics solutions, which come in two flavors, one featuring stock speed and a SuperClocked variant. The new cards are reported to be already available on the company's site, while expected to become available worldwide in a short notice.
The most interesting feature of the new parts is that they are manufactured under the 55nm fabrication process, which means they should be quite different from the 65nm GTX 260 flavors already available. The features list of the cards includes support for NVIDIA SLI Technology, Full Microsoft DirectX 10 Shader Model 4.0 Support, True 128-Bit Floating Point High Dynamic-Range (HDR), PCI Express 2.0 / 1.1 Support, 2nd Generation Unified Shader Architecture, CUDA Support, PhysX Ready, PureVideo HD Technology, HybridPower Technology, as well as OpenGL 3.0 Support.
The new 55nm GTX 260 stock sports a 576 MHz GPU, 216 Processing Cores and a 400 MHz RAMDAC, while the SuperClocked model has a 626 MHz GPU. Both cards come with 896 MB, 448 bit DDR3 memory, which offers a 111.9 GB/s Memory Bandwidth for the stock version and 117.9 GB/s for the overclocked flavor. The cards come with a PCI-E 2.0 16x interface and feature dual DVI-I and HDTV-7 ports.
The cards might sound really appealing to some, yet we should consider that NVIDIA hasn't managed to fine-tune its production of 55nm GTX 260 chips. Waiting a little longer before acquiring such a card might help you get better binned cards, especially when overclocking capabilities are taken into consideration.
There are some voices that would say NVIDIA is also working on capitalizing on the 65nm fabrication on those that might not know or not care about the difference between the technologies. The bottom line would be that the company is expected to improve the 55nm fabrication process in time.
