‘It’s Coming’ Facebook update teases new hardware under Geforce branding. Could it be a dual-GPU 690, 670Ti, or something else altogether?
‘It’s Coming’ Facebook update teases new hardware under Geforce branding. Could it be a dual-GPU 690, 670Ti, or something else altogether?
Is a new Graphics Card coming from NVIDIA sooner rather than later? That certainly seems to be the case if a stealthy update on NVIDIA’s official Geforce Facebook page is anything to go by. The new image, reposted above, appears to show a new heat shroud for a graphics card etched with the new Geforce logo.
Although rumours of a GK110 ‘Full Fat’ GPU, featuring many more shader cores than the GK104 upon which the GTX 680 is based, continue to circulate such a release seems extremely unlikely. Customer loyalty is important, and unfortunately those who have already invested in a 680 at £400+ a pop probably wouldn’t feel well disposed towards a new flagship being released barely a month after the top single-GPU SKU was released.
More probably is a dual-GPU GTX 690, featuring two GK104 cores. It would compete directly with AMD’s upcoming HD7990, and also explain the relative lack of GTX 680 cards in retail channels right now.
Also going some way towards the idea that NVIDIA are withholding GK104’s could be a ‘superclocked’ GK104 with much higher reference frequencies. Selective binning is a process which NVIDIA, AMD and Intel go through with all their processors; even though it’s most often implemented to ‘salvage’ parts for lower SKUs (e.g. the GTX 570) there’s no reason why it couldn’t be done to extract the best clocking chips for a GTX 685 or similar.
Other options are a GTX 670Ti or 660, bringing Kepler to a much lower price point, or even a 4GB GTX 680 (if that’s worthy of the tease). Of all things, this is the most logical and likely, and the release of a 670Ti/670 in late April tallies with the best information we have right now.
Are you looking forward to a new release, and what do you think it will be. Let us know in the comments.
Source Facebook
