14 DAY TRIAL // The hype built around the upcoming GeForce GTX 470 and GTX 480 graphics adapters from NVIDIA has reached such levels, that all of NVIDIA's other projects and endeavors are seen as boring or minor compared with the upcoming Fermi launch. In fact, even pictures of just the empty boxes of these adapters have been seeing more attention than the next-generation ION, at least to some degree. Now, it seems that, in addition to EVGA and Galaxy, Palit will also be presenting Fermi cards at the end of the month.
Unfortunately, as end-users might expect, the so-called pictures of the product packaging don't exactly reveal anything new. The company went for an engine theme with a silver color scheme for the GTX 470 and a gold scheme for the 480. As for graphical capabilities and actual performance, the boxes only confirm what was previewed before, namely PhysX support, CUDA, 3D Vision Surround and SLI. As for the memory capacities, Palit's cards don't stray from the stock version, with the GTX 470 featuring 1,280MB GDDR5 and the GTX 480 designed with 1,536MB.
As it has become apparent, this particular so-called leak sticks to the “reveal no clock speeds” rule that has, so far, only been circumvented once, when PCTuning posted a benchmarking result that also showed the memory frequency of the GTX 470. The GF100 GPU clock speed is still a mystery, even now.
It is true that these pictures of Palit's boxes don't exactly give any real information, but their mere existence shows that there will be more than just one or two models on sale initially. This will lead to a competition among NVIDIA's rivals, a competition that will, hopefully, trigger a price war that will enable more accessible graphics-card prices. Just how accessible the prices will turn out to be will be revealed on March 26/27, at PAX 2010, when NVIDIA plans to make the official introduction.
