14 DAY TRIAL // It appears that NVIDIA's partners have had their fill of new 500 series releases, which means that other cards can now come out, like Palit's newest model for HTPCs, a GT 440 adapter.
While the 500 series of NVIDIA boards has already established itself as the best that its maker has to offer for the high-end and mainstream segments, the 400 line is still in effect on the low-end.
Palit has now been reported to have completed a new model that is to be part of this very collection of graphics adapters.
Dubbed GT 440, it is supposedly intended for HTPCs (home-theater personal computers), despite the fact that it doesn't really look like a board for SFF (small form factor) systems.
Of course, this is just one of the GT 440 that NVIDIA and its OEM's will launch, the main wave set to commence in a day or so (the report says so at least).
One would expect a HTPC card to use a low profile PCB (printed circuit board), since cases for them are mostly intended to be compact, but Palit decided to use a full-height design for some reason.
Still, as far as performance goes, the newcomer does seem to deliver, even though, naturally, it is nowhere near the GTS or GTX level.
The GPU has a clock speed of 810 MHz, while the 96 CUDA cores operate at a speed of 1,620 MHz.
Meanwhile, the 1 GB of GDDR5 memory has a frequency of 3,200 MHz and is complemented by an interface of 128 bits.
So far, DirectX 11 is only (mostly) relevant in games that employ Tessellation, so this technology may not be so much of an asset on multimedia-centric systems.
What remains to be seen is how many other boards of this sort get launched and if Palit's model does well against the low profile ones, provided such cards are on the way of course, which is likely.