14 DAY TRIAL // The official announcement of NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 470 and GTX 480 cards is just barely over a week away but, amazingly, any information regarding the product specs still hasn't come out from under whichever rock it is hiding. In fact, all so-called news concerning these cards, or custom versions, have been just pictures of cardboard boxes that may or may not have had a card inside. Now, the gods of leaks seem to have finally smiled upon the Internet, as a leaked NVIDIA slide has finally revealed what the GTX 480 looks like.
Cvasi-officially, the GTX 480 is now known to measure 10.5 inches, has a large, dual-slot cooling mechanism with a somewhat barbecue-shaped heatsink. The cooler also has three heatpipes, which may suggest some overclocking potential underneath that heavy metal armor.
The board's memory capacity is confirmed at 1,536MB GDDR5 and indeed operates on a 384-bit interface. Furthermore, the slide shows that the card has support for 3-way SLI configurations and a power consumption of under 300W. One 6-pin and one 8-pin PCI Express power connector will be used to fuel the adapter.
Unfortunately, and quite predictably in fact, the supposedly 'confidential' slide did not give any information on the clock speeds of the VRAM and graphics processing unit. This information may, in fact, not even make it to the web before the card is officially launched, considering how tight-lipped NVIDIA has been so far. Of course, there is also the high probability that more leaks will come out until then, especially since the GTX 470 still hasn't been pictured yet.
NVIDIA is planning on officially introducing its DirectX 11 graphics cards on March 26, at PAX 2010. Actual availability of the devices may not come until April, but at least the mystery surrounding the supposedly unsurpassed GF100 will be elucidated.