Web-Site Displays GeForce GTX 480 Graphics Card with 512 Stream Processors

From X-bit Labs: When Nvidia Corp. unveiled its Fermi architecture first in September, 2009, the firm said that the top-of-the-range offering will include 512 stream processors. However, it released no actual products on the fully-fledged chip. On Wednesday a web-site published a picture of a graphics card that it claims to be powered by the code-named GF100 graphics chip with all 512 stream processors activated.

The graphics solution resembles the original GeForce GTX 480, which comes with 480 stream processors activated, but has tangibly improved power supply circuitry and consumes much more power as it is equipped with two PCIe 8-pin power connectors (together with PCIe x16 slot they can provide up to 375W of power). Based on the image published by Expreview web-site, the board also looks slightly longer than the predecessor, possibly because of higher power consumption and greater heat dissipation.

The board carries a chip marked as "4", twelve GDDR5 memory chips and a regular set of connectors, including two dual-link DVI, one HDMI, two MIO ports for 4-way SLI multi-GPU operation support and so on. Considering that all the formal marks of the chip are blurred, just like the revision of the graphics processing unit (GPU) on a screenshot from GPU-Z software, there are some chances that Nvidia plans to use a new revision of the GF100 graphics chip.

Based on the screenshot from GPU-Z program, the board has clock-speeds similar to those of the original GeForce GTX 480: 650MHz for the graphics chip, 1400MHz for stream processors and 3700MHz for 1536MB of GDDR5 memory. The card surprisingly carries the same Device ID as the original GeForce GTX 480 and the software indicated March 26, 2010, release date. Usually, different graphics boards carry different Device IDs, based on which programs like GPU-Z determine the amount of stream processors and other peculiarities. Performance of the board obtained using an Intel Core i7-920-based system (3.80GHz) along with Futuremark 3DMark Vantage also cause more questions than answers since the board only achieves P23904 points, whereas a similar system without overclocked CPU with GeForce GTX 480 gets P21427 points with older drivers.

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