NVIDIA GeForce GTX 280 Graphic card series Launch on June 18

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NVIDIA GeForce GT 280 Graphic card -


Nvidia is set to launch its upcoming high-end GeForce GTX 280 (codenamed GT200) next month on June 18th just ahead of the launch of the ATI RV770 series of graphics cards from AMD.PCPOP over in China managed to get a hold of a reference designed GTX 280 graphics card and strip it completely naked for public viewing.



From the pictures, it looks as if it will be roughly the same size as the current high-end GeForce 9800 GTX and you will need to hook up one 6-pin and one 8-pin power adapter to make it run at full speed.


Nvidia has dared to make a drastic move in its naming convention. According to several sources close to the company, the new flagship chip codenamed GT200 and D10U-30 and D10U-20 will end up with Geforce GTX 280 brand for the faster card.There will be one more branded as Geforce GTX 260 and this would be the one that many believed will be branded as Geforce 9900GT.



The launch should take place on the 18th of June, just in the middle of week 25, and at current schedule that is two days after ATI's RV770 launch.


We managed to confirm a few details about the GT200. This is without a doubt a single chip card, and as we said before, it's quite a big one. The second important detail is that the chip supports 512-bit memory, and at least on the memory side it is ready to fight the RV770 XT from ATI. We know that the GT200 is a high performance part and it will certainly be faster than the RV770 XT chipset, but we are not sure if it will be faster than the R700, a dual chip card. At this time, no one knows the answer to that. It needs a dual slot cooler and it will dissipate quite a lot of heat, but it promises great performance.



Nvidia has informed their partners about the change in naming for the upcoming GT200 series today. Previously, the marketing name for GT200 is GeForce 9900 series when launched but now it has been changed to GeForce GTX 200 series. GeForce 9900 GTX is now GeForce GTX 280 and GeForce 9900 GTS is now GeForce GTX 260. Nvidia has decided to launch them slightly earlier to coincide with RV770 launch which is around third week of June. However, Nvidia plans to show the GeForce GTX 280 card behind doors at Computex.



The more affordable GT200 card, the GTX 260 has 'only' 192 Stream Processors, a 448-bit memory interface and 896 MB of GDDR3 memory. Expect the GTX 260 to be about $100 cheaper than the GTX 280. Both card will be officially introduced around June 18