As we told you yesterday, two online retailers have already listed an ASUS version of NVIDIA's yet-to-be released GT-200 based graphics card. Although the listing was clearly a fluke on behalf of the retailers, it did come to confirm one thing: we are probably going to see NVIDIA's next generation graphics cards by the end of this month. Now, if this thought doesn't get all of you gaming and technology enthusiasts excited, I don't know what will.

And, just to get you more hyped than what you already are, a couple of journalists have been able to get their hands on what appears to be the final specifications list of the new graphics cards from NVIDIA. Although some of the details have been speculated on over the web for quite a long time now, it is interesting to see what we are to expect from NVIDIA's new graphics offer.

As most of you have already imagined, the GT200-based, GeForce GTX 260 is the slower of the two cards in the lineup. The GPU of this model is built on a 65nm manufacturing technology and has 1.4 billion transistors. It will come standardly clocked at 576MHz, while the Shaders feature a clock speed of 1242MHz. There are no less than 192 Shaders and, apparently, from now on they will be called processor cores.

The GTX 260 is expected to offer 896MB of GGDR3 memory, clocked at 999MHz (1998MHz effectively), making it capable of providing a 111.9GB/s bandwidth. The strange thing about this card is obviously its memory level and the fact that NVIDIA disabled some of its clusters in order to make it less powerful.

The next-generation high-end graphics card, GTX 280, is expected to come with 1.4 billion transistors clocked at 602MHz. The Shaders, or processor cores, are going to be clocked at 1296MHz. NVIDIA's chip is expected to come with 240 cores. It is clear now that the GTX 280 is actually the same card as the GTX 260, the only difference being that it has no clusters disabled.

As far as memory is concerned, the GTX 280 is going to provide users with 1GB of GDDR3 memory, built on a 512-bit memory interface and clocked at 1107 (2214MHz). These specs allow the card to achieve a high bandwidth of 141.7GB/s.

The remaining specs are rather general but worthy of our time nonetheless: both cards will come with support for HDCP and HDVI via DVI to HDMI adapter and with two dual-link DVI-I and single HDTV out. The RAMDAC is set at 400MHz, as with the current NVIDIA GeForce 8 and 9-series. Both cards will come in a dual-slot with PCIe 2.0 configuration.