NVIDIA GeForce GTX 480, 470 specs out in the open ahead of launch

The official unveiling of the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 480 and 470 is just days away, but leaks have brought to the fore a handful of specifications, including an image of what the new cards would look like.

Pic: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 480 photo from Donanimhaber

What we get to hear is that the high end NVIDIA GTX 480 and GTX 470 cards would come with price tags of $ 499 and $ 349 respectively. More specs now being splashed over forums say that the GTX 480 offer 480 shader processors, a 384-bit interface to 1.5GB of onboard GDDR5 RAM, and clock speeds of 700MHz, 1,401MHz, and 1,848MHz for the core, shaders and memory, respectively.

We have found a photo of the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 480 and with some difficulty traced its origin to here. The same pictures have been reproduced in multiple blogs and everyone seems to believe that this is a real pic.

Meanwhile, the GTX 470 card  will come with 446 shader processors, slower clocks, and a 320-bit memory interface. This way, it looks like the $349 price is justifiable.

Comparison attempts done by tech bloggers say that the GeForce GTX 470 would be around 10 per cent faster than Radeon HD 5850. Similar would be the case for GeForce GTX 480 over the Radeon HD 5870. It has been revealed that the TDP of GeForce GTX 480 would be similar to the dual GPU card that Radeon HD 5970 has. With NVIDIA lining up plans for dual Fermi cards, we expect the TDP to get more exciting. The GeForce GTX 480 would debut with the clocks lowered to 700/1401/1848MHz at 250W TDP, say the reports that banked on the leak to churn out the info.

Talking of the Fermi,  it may be recalled that NVIDIA had a while back hinted at making the GTX480 and 470 cards the CUDA architecture. CUDA, also called Fermi, is believed to be the most advanced GPU computing architecture ever built. Fermi would return supercomputing features and performance at 1/10th the cost and 1/20th the power of traditional CPU-only servers, with the aid of 3 billion transistors and up to 512 CUDA cores.

We expect this information to get an official stamp when the official unveiling comes up on March 26, which would be coinciding with NVIDIA’s GeForce LAN event at PAX 2010.