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The State of Fermi

By Kenny Yeo - on 13 May 2010, 1:50pm

The State of Fermi

NVIDIA's new Fermi cards has been out for nearly two full months now and generally, reception to NVIDIA's latest have been lukewarm. While the GeForce GTX 480 and GTX 470 are undoubtedly fast, their operating temperatures and power consumption figures are some of the highest we've seen from any graphics card, and is a cause for worry.

Recently, vendors are coming up with customized editions of the GeForce GTX 470. We've reviewed one such card, the Galaxy GeForce GTX 470 GC version and found that while the cooler did lower operating temperatures, power consumption figures remain high.

Computex 2010 takes place in the beginning of June and it is where hardware manufacturers show off their latest and greatest products. Rumor has it that NVIDIA will unveil the newest addition to the Fermi family at Computex.

Allegedly, the new card will be dubbed the GeForce GTX 465 and it will supposedly sport 352 shader multiprocessors – 96 less than the GTX 470. Prices are claimed to start from US$249, which puts it up against the Radeon HD 5850. If these speculations are true, the GeForce GTX 465 would still be a rather high-end offering from NVIDIA.

What I'm more interested to see is a true mainstream graphics card (think GeForce 9800 GT and 9600 GT) powered by a Fermi chip. Seeing how hot the GeForce GTX 480 and 470 are, I suppose NVIDIA will need pull off something special to make mainstream Fermi cards run acceptably for casual gamers and general users.

Anyhow Computex is round the corner, so if there's anything new from NVIDIA, hopefully we'll see it there. Be sure to check out our Computex coverage in early June then.

Kenny Yeo

Kenny Yeo / Associate Editor

Specifications are not everything. It's what you do with what you have that matters.

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