NVIDIA GTX 560 Not Official but Already Selling, Courtesy of Gigabyte

Apparently, and not altogether surprisingly, a custom version of NVIDIA's not yet released mainstream 500 series video card has made it to Europe, complete with its very own dose of factory overclocking.

As end-users know, today (January 25, 2011) is the day when NVIDIA is set to officially launch the GeForce GTX 560 Ti video card.

'Ti' is the moniker that is set to show up on every new NVIDIA controller, except those aimed at the high-end/enthusiast market.

Regardless, the GTX 560 will be the first mainstream 500 board to come out of the Santa Clara, California-based company's labs.

Of course, even though it tried secrecy, it was inevitable that leaks and previews of the product would come out.

Now, something even more concrete has occurred, namely the beginning of sales for Gigabyte's own GTX 560 Ti OC, ahead of launch.

As revealed by the folks over at Fudzilla, the model has already show up in Europe, with a price tag of 229 Euro.

For those interested in a reminder, the card uses the GF114 GPU and 1 GB of GDDR5 VRAM, memory complemented by an interface of 385 bits.

The clock speeds are of 900 MHz for the graphics chip (822 MHz stock) and 4,200 MHz for the memory.

Basically, it is a visibly more powerful iteration of the stock board, meaning that there is little doubt other cards set to debut later on will be more affordable.

Interestingly enough, Gigabyte is not the only company to jump the gun, as an ASUS model has also been the subject of recent news.

All that remains is for NVIDIA to finally make its formal announcement, after which the market will truly see an influx of new DirectX 11 graphics controllers. Meanwhile, to deal with the pressure, AMD decided to act fast and cut the prices of its Radeon HD 6900 and 6800 series.