Jan 28, 2011 07:03 GMT  ·  By

Without a doubt, Q1, 2011 is already shaping up to be quite a hot period for the world's two best-known graphics cards manufacturers, NVIDIA and AMD, each trying to outpace each other by coming up with new and innovative products available at lower price points.

And while NVIDIA has most of its bases covered, from mainstream (the newly-released GTX 560 Ti) to enthusiast (the GTX 580) levels, it still lacks one important product in its lineup, namely a true top-of-the line graphics monster, a dual-GPU card.

However, it would seem that we won't have to wait too much in order to see this behemoth make its way onto the market, since the latest rumors seem to indicate that the dual-GPU GTX 590 graphics card is apparently set for a February release, as TCMagazine reports.

The card (whose photo, in its EVGA incarnation, has already been leaked online a while ago) will apparently be built around two 40nm GF110 cores, that have a lower TDP than their predecessors, the initial GF100 Fermi cores.

Further speculating on the tech specs list, we'll have to point out that the GTX 590 will most likely come equipped with 1024 CUDA Cores, a 2 x 384-bit memory interface and 3GB of GDDR5 memory, as well as a centered 90mm fan to cool the two cores.

Of course, these are all the bits and pieces of info available for the time being, so it remains to be seen what will happen next, and, more importantly, just how well the GTX 590 (if proved to be a real product) will fare against its direct competitor, AMD's dual-GPU Radeon HD 5990, set to also arrive in Q1, 2011 and said to pack 3072 Stream Processors and 4GB of VRAM.

And, of course, we won't even go near the topic of pricing, because either of these dual-core graphics cards will most likely be quite expensive.