With the rumoured release of NVIDIA's revamped mid-range challenger - the GeForce GTX 560 - less than a week away, the flood gates have opened for details on the new card.
We've already seen early benchmarks, as well as listings for a pair of factory overclocked models, but now some pictures of the reference design have appeared on the web (courtesy of TechConnect, since the originals seem to have been pulled from Taiwanese site CoolPC).
In honesty, there's not a lot to see here, and were it not for the label on the sticker, you'd be hard pressed to tell this card from a stock GTX 460 - even with the shroud off. Of course, that's neither surprising, nor a particularly bad thing. The original GF104-based boards ran cool and quiet and were more than capable of handling the high-overclocks that the GPU was capable of.
Based on what we know so far, the GF114 will have a core clock of around 823MHz, meaning that the 384 Cuda cores would tick along at 1,646MHz. The 1GB frame buffer will run at around 4GHz and connect to the GPU via a 256-bit bus.
Based on the performance numbers leaked a few weeks ago, the GTX 560 should perform somewhere between the older GTX 470 and AMD's Radeon HD 6950, depending on the game or benchmark. Based on that, we'd expect the card to hit retailers in the region of £220-230 for the reference models.
Of course, if the GTX 460 is anything to go by, we're bound to see a bevy of factory overclocked versions with custom coolers hitting the market shortly after launch.
