NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 480 may have won the single-GPU performance crown, but it hasn't managed to win over the masses for numerous reasons - it's pricey (not to mention currently unavailable), power hungry and a little hot under the collar.
Making matters worse, the competition has an array of attractive alternatives. NVIDIA doesn't appear to have an immediate answer, but further down the line, a redesigned GeForce GTX 480 could make things interesting in a number of ways.
With that in mind, these peculiar-looking PCB shots have caught our eye:
Pictured by Chinese website Expreview.com, the images depict what's believed to be a custom GeForce GTX 480 designed by Chinese manufacturer Taiyanfa.
Users should be able to determine that the custom PCB is shorter than NVIDIA's reference design, and what's interesting is that it uses a duo of six-pin power connectors, as opposed to NVIDIA's six-pin and eight-pin layout.
How might that be possible? Well, the obvious answer is that this design could be a down-clocked design manufactured to fit in between the GTX 480 and GTX 470. That'd make it both cooler and cheaper to run, albeit at the expense of all-out performance.
Then again, we're still not ruling out the possibility of belated April Fool's jokes.
