14 DAY TRIAL // AMD's ATI Radeon HD 5970 has been selling for more than half a year now, and the CPU and GPU maker's partners have already demonstrated 4GB versions of it. This puts NVIDIA in a rather tight position, considering it has yet to even develop a dual-Fermi adapter. Had research proceeded more smoothly, NVIDIA might have succeeded in bringing such a card out when there was only AMD's stock model to contend with. Now, the fight may turn out to be twice as difficult.
Of course, this is all speculation, considering that there is no information on what enthusiasts might expect from a dual-GPU DirectX 11 NVIDIA card. Or, at least, there wasn't any information until KitGuru decided to more closely “look under the rocks in Taiwan.” Apparently, the beast will bear the name of GeForce GTX 490 and, despite all the necessary downclocking and the supposed decision to use the GF104 GPU instead of the GF100, will eat up enough power to make it, and especially SLI configurations, quite difficult to run without a superpowered PSU.
The GTX 490 will have a TDP (thermal design power) of 375W. KitGuru seems to think that, despite the aforementioned rumor, it is still the GPU at the heart of the GT470 that will be used. Given that said part eats 215W on its own, however, it would have to be severely handicapped in order to reach the 'low' 375W consumption. Unfortunately, the team was unable to discover any details on clock speeds, amount of memory and exact availability, though an official announcement should come before summer is out.
What remains to be seen is whether this newcomer repeats the performance of the GTX 470 and claims the performance crown in its class. After that, its price point and the availability of PSUs capable of sustaining SLI scenarios may have the final say in marketing performance.