Sources in the hardware industry leaked some interesting pictures of a new, supposedly reference-design NVIDIA GF100 GPU graphics card PCB, watermarked by board partner Little Tiger. The pictures reveal a PCB that's similar to that of the GeForce GTX 480, but with a stronger VRM that makes use of better high-C surface-mount capacitors (completely doing away with cylindrical capacitors), and draws power from two 8-pin PCI-Express power inputs. The design can deliver up to 375W of power (that's not the board power we're talking about).
This also opens up speculation about what NVIDIA would do with this design. The most talked about theory as of now points to a new high-end SKU by NVIDIA based on the GF100, that enables all streaming multiprocessors (SMs) physically present on the GF100, taking the CUDA core count up to 512, and ROP count to 64. The most likely marketing name for this SKU is GeForce GTX 485. Apart from higher CUDA core and ROP count than that of the GTX 480, slightly higher clock-speeds for the GPU are also on the cards. The memory subsystem remains untouched, at 1536 MB of GDDR5 memory clocked at 924 MHz (effective 3.7 GHz), over a 384-bit wide memory interface. NVIDIA could release this SKU this fall.
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this card was funny:P
