It's all gone Pete Tong
Despite having an official launch date of the 21st February, reviews of the GeForce are already available on the internet and, apparently, you can even buy one.
The dam appeared to burst when South African etailer Take2 offered a Chaintech nVidia GeForce 9600GT - 512MB card on its site. This seemed to just be on pre-order, but a note at the bottom of the page linked to this image of the box, which they claimed they already had in their warehouse. The note was dated 12th February 2008
A couple of days later, an Aussie tech site latched onto this news, promising its first 9600GT content would be online soon.
It then proceeded to publish a 20-page review of a Galaxy 9600GT on the 15th.
The same day a UK PC mag appeared to publish a 9600GT review, only to take it down soon after.
A quick product search a few hours ago revealed a couple of sites selling it in the UK, including BPSD.
This is bound to annoy, if not anger many of NVIDIA’s channel partners and friends in the media, many of whom will already have product or have written reviews, but were waiting until the launch date to make them publicly available.
The GeForce 9600GT is the first incarnation of NVIDIA’s latest series of GPUs – the 9000 series. With this being their first new series for over a year there was bound to be a fair bit if interest in it and commercial advantage in having product or reviews ahead of rivals.
This is why product launches are usually accompanied by some kind of non disclosure agreement (NDA) in which all parties with advance knowledge of the product agree to keep it to themselves until a precise date and time.
It’s in the interest of the manufacturer of the product to have an NDA so that a) it can exert control over the launch of its product and b) it can ensure a fair crack of the whip to channel partners and media. The launch date had originally been set for the 14th, but the delay of a week was broadly communicated well in advance.
We can only assume that the above premature manifestations of 9600GT product and content were in breach of agreements with NVIDIA. It would be nice to know how this happened, however and what, if anything, NVIDIA is going to do about it.
