Runs the A3 revision of the GF100 silicon

Mar 10, 2010 10:46 GMT  ·  By

With the steady approach of the GTX 470 and GTX 480 official launch date, NVIDIA has been staying faithful to its policy of silence and has handed little to no details on the exact specifications of its upcoming cards. In fact, the closest thing to performance numbers that was made available was the video demonstration of the upcoming video board running the Unigine benchmark. Still, even though NVIDIA strove, and somewhat succeeded, in giving a whole-new meaning to the phrase “silent as the grave,” it was only a matter of time before a more detailed leak made it out.

Of course, as it is the case with all pre-release reports, there is no way of verifying the validity of this most recent report. According to Czech technology website PCTuning, the GeForce GTX 470 was tested under a beta NVIDIA driver known as the GeForce 196.78. The card used in the test was based on the A3 revision of the GF100 graphics processing unit and the system dialog was finally able to reveal and/or confirm part of the actual card specs.

According to PCTuning, the video controller has 448 CUDA cores, which are actually named SIMD units. As previously reported, the amount of GDDR5 memory with which this model is designed is of 1,280MB, whereas the interface is of 320 bits. Unlike previous cards, however, the GPU maker changed the way memory clock speeds were represented. The actual clock speed is of 1000MHz, which makes the data rate (DDR speed) equal to 2000MHz and the so-called “effective speed” to 4000MHz. As such, the 1000MHz GDDR5 enables a memory bandwidth of 160GB/s.

Besides just these revelations, the report was also able to provide a peek at what the card looked like. NVIDIA used a basic cooler design with a matte finish and gave its product two DVI-D connectors and a mini HDMI one. Unfortunately, the report does not have any information on the GTX 480, though its capabilities will obviously be superior.

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First specs of the NVIDIA GTX 470 surface
First specs of the NVIDIA GTX 470 surface
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