14 DAY TRIAL // As you might have heard, a short while back, NVIDIA was rumored to be preparing to bring a second 55nm graphics card based on the GeForce 9500GT GPU. Unfortunately, the Santa-Clara-based graphics manufacturer has already released the card, but has equipped it with a 65nm graphics processor. Still, rumors of a future 55nm-based GeForce 9500GT continue to make the rounds as we speak.
According to sources cited by Digitimes, the green company will put out a second GeForce 9500GT card, which will be built with a 55nm GPU. Rumored to make its debut in Q4 this year, it is designed to become a direct competitor to AMD's Radeon HD 3650. Details about the card are scarce right now but, given the fact that it is built on the 55nm fabrication process, it should provide higher clock speeds and better overall performance than the 65nm version launched yesterday.
The current 9500GT cards provide a core clock of 550MHz and 1GB of DDR2 memory set to work at 1000MHz. There is also a GDDR3 version that packs the same amount of graphic memory, but with a higher speed, of 1600MHz. This GPU is equipped with 32 stream processors clocked at 1400MHz and is compatible with NVIDIA's PureVideo, SLI, PhysX and CUDA technologies. The 9500GT has been released to replace the company's current 8600GT products, and comes with a price tag set somewhere at $65-$75.
Because there are so many NVIDIA board partners, we will probably see countless GeForce 9500GT-based cards being released in the near future. Some of them might actually provide higher clocked GPUs equipped with custom cooling solutions.
It is still uncertain if a 55nm version of the mainstream GeForce 9800GT GPU will come to be released, but further info should become available pretty soon. In the meanwhile, we're left with the seemingly never-ending rumors on NVIDIA's upcoming product.