Jan 11, 2011 20:01 GMT  ·  By

As time goes by and we are getting nearer to the launch of the Nvidia GTX 560 more details regarding this upcoming GPU come to light, recent rumors suggesting that Nvidia choose to drop its recommended retail price to about $279.

Initially, the card was supposed to be launched at $300 US, the same price as that asked by AMD for the Radeon HD 6950.

This wasn't at all surprising, since the HD 6950 managed to find a sweet spot on the GPU market where Nvidia didn't have anything to counter it with.

However, this doesn't seem to be the case anymore, as the KitGuru website claims that the GTX 560 recommended price has been lowered to $279.

The new price puts it right in between the $350 GeForce GTX 570 and the $240 GeForce GTX 470 while also being about $20 cheaper than the AMD Radeon HD 6950.

Compared to the previous generation Radeon HD 5870, the GTX 560 will be about $30 more expensive.

Although its performance level is not known at this time (outside from some speculations), the card is based on the GF114 architecture that features 384 CUDA cores, as we previously reported.

In addition, the GTX 560 also boats 32 ROP units, a 256-bit wide memory interface as well as 1 GB of video buffer, the core clock being run at 820MHz while the GDDR5 chips are clocked at 4000 MHz, pushing the memory bandwidth to 128 GB/s.

As all the other 500-series Nvidia GPUs, this will also be built using TSMC's 40nm manufacturing process, previous leaks suggesting that its TDP will be rated at 180W (compared to the 160W required by the GTX 460).

As far as the launch date is concerned, the card is expected to ship January 25, just two weeks from now.