14 DAY TRIAL // NVIDIA just fulfilled PC makers' wish for a rang of mobile graphics cards, but the 400M series is not the only product that the company has completed, the Santa Clara, California-based outfit having also added the GeForce GT 420 to its official website.
As end-users well know by now, the Fermi architecture form NVIDIA is the basis for all of its DirectX 11 graphics solutions.
The 400M series was only just made official and is slated to be adopted by new mobile computers from Acer, ASUS, Dell, Samsung, Toshiba, Lenovo and others.
Still, while this line stole the spotlight, another product stealthily took its place on NVIDIA's website, namely the GeForce GT 420 low profile card.
The newcomer is most likely based on the GF108 graphics processing unit and, for now, has only been made available to OEMs.
Even from the first glance, it become obvious that this product is not meant for the same upper segments as the GTX models or even the GTS 450.
For one, the supposed GF108, based on the 40nm manufacturing process technology, has a clock speed of 700 MHz and is paired with only 48 CUDA cores that run at 1,400 MHz.
Secondly, though it has 2GB of memory, said memory is of the DDR3 variety and has a clock speed of 1,800 MHz.
Other specifications include support for Blu-ray 3D and NVIDIA's own technologies, such as CUDA and PhysX.
Finally, as a major advantage over the higher-end models, this device has a power consumption of only 50W.
As for video output, the company threw in D-Sub, DVI and HDMI connectors, so that the product may be compatible with a wide range of display solutions.
As already mentioned, the low-end Fermi graphics adapter NVIDIA GeForce GT 420 is only shipping to system manufacturers and its price has, unfortunately, not been mentioned.