Mysterious NVIDIA GeForce Card Could Be Fermi-Based

Today is marked by the official debut of AMD's much-anticipated Radeon HD 5970, a dual-GPU graphics card that has been designed to become the world's fastest card on the market. Featuring impressive specifications, this card is likely to outperform NVIDIA's current offering, putting AMD in the first place of the high-performance graphics segment. However, the Santa Clara, California-based chip maker could not sit and watch as their main competitor is stealing the show, which is why they showcased a picture of a new GeForce card, that might just be based on the company's much-anticipated Fermi architecture.

Posted on the company's Wall Photos page, on their Facebook account, the picture shows, among many other things, a black GeForce-branded card installed on an ASUS Rampage II Extreme motherboard. The details are scarce, as you might have figured it out, but according to the comments below the said picture, we are looking at a set-up that includes the aforementioned motherboard, a Dell 24-inch (1920 by 1200) monitor, and a GeForce card that has been tagged as a “TOTAL MONSTER!.”

We have no way of telling whether this is one of NVIDIA's next-generation, 40nm Fermi-based graphics cards, but according to the other comments below the picture, the card will be featured with a PCI-Express 8-pin and 6-pin power connector, which should be an indication of the necessary power that it will require to run. In addition, we can observe that this is a rather lengthy card, but we should wait until it will be officially announced and put it aside the newly-introduced Radeon HD 5970.

There are a couple of reports on the Internet, in reference to the expected launch date of the much-anticipated card, some of which point sometime early next year. If that's the case, AMD will have some time to improve its market share in the high-performance segment, since the new 'Hemlock' Radeon HD 5970 will likely beat anything NVIDIA currently has on the market.