14 DAY TRIAL // When it was first announced, all those months ago, NVIDIA's GF100 Fermi graphics processing unit was implied to have 512 stream processors, instead of just 480. Due to tight supply of 40nm chips, however, the outfit was forced to tone it down in order to actually get enough cards on the market. Now, it seems that the Santa Clara, California-based GPU maker may be planning on finally pushing full-force GTX 480, if a certain report made by Expreview is anything to go by.
Expreview claims to have gotten a hold of a picture of the card's PCB (printed circuit board) and even some benchmarking results from what it names “a mysterious friend.” The board supposedly has all 512 streaming multiprocessors enabled, though there does not seem to be much, if any other difference between it and the 'regular' GTX 480 that is already on sale. This means that the GF100 itself still runs at 701 MHz, whereas the shaders operate at 1401 MHz and the GDDR5 at 924 MHz (1828 MHz).
The photo of the card reveals the existence of a yellow tantalum capacitor that covers the entire PCB. There is also a 12 GDDR5 granularity and 1536 MB of actual memory. Furthermore, the board boast not one, but two 8-pin PCI Express power connectors and an 8 phase power design. Also, the memory interface is of 384 bits and communication is done through dual-DVI and mini-HDMI connectors. All in all, the board should be more powerful that the 480 SP-equipped one. Expreview even posted some benchmarking results.
The tests were made on a system powered by an Intel Core i7-920 central processing unit overclocked to 3.8 GHz. The configuration also had 6GB of DDR3 available. In 3DMark Vantage, it got a score of P23904, while the GPU score was 19857. Unfortunately, it is unknown when, exactly, this 512 SP GTX 480 will actually debut.