14 DAY TRIAL // Visitors to this year's CeBIT expo in Hanover, Germany will most likely be pleased to see NVIDIA's Fermi graphics card in action. The California-based GPU maker has been working on the technology for a very long time and hopes to score massively when it finally makes the formal announcement at PAX 2010. This, of course, means that the company will continue its vow of silence and put off giving out any sort of specific details until the proper time comes. However, in the meantime, NVIDIA's partners see no harm in demonstrating the capabilities of these cards at CeBIT.
Multiple NVIDIA partners have set up configurations based on Fermi cards and are demonstrating them live at CeBIT 2010. Unfortunately, they are not allowed to mention, at this time, anything regarding the actual card specifications. This means that, despite all hopes that NVIDIA would give some numbers, the amount of memory, the clocks, number of cores, memory bandwidth and everything else concerning the GTX 470 and GTX 480 specs will remain a mystery.
Not long ago, the folks over at Fudzilla got a report that NVIDIA might still choose to make some changes to the performance numbers and even to the cooler, which meant that even its partners did not know the final clock speeds. Now, the very same Fudzilla reports that the cooler has, indeed, been changed, with the one now used being a dual-slot solution with four copper heatpipes. Unfortunately, no pictures are available.
All is not lost, however. It seems that, regardless of how unlikely, a series of photos supposedly depicting the box of the Gigabyte GTX cards have somehow made their way to the web. The packages show compatibility with PCI Express 2.0, the long-awaited DirectX 11 support, a memory bandwidth of 384 bits and a total GDDR5 memory capacity of as much as 1536MB. The cards also supposedly boast 7.1 channel audio.
NVIDIA will be making the formal announcement at PAX 2010, most likely on March 27, although the card should show up as early as March 26.
Live report by Traian Teglet from CeBIT 2010 in Hanover, Germany.
