Though Nvidia has already begun releasing video cards in its next-generation 500 series, it’s not quite done filling out the 400s yet. That was proven today when a number of Nvidia’s add-in partners revealed their products designed around a revamped retail version of Nvidia’s GT 440.
If the name sounds familiar, it should be—Nvidia released an OEM-only GPU with that name back in October, to fit in roughly between two of the company’s other lower-end mainstream offerings with the Fermi architecture: the GTS 450 and the GT 430. This new GT 440 institutes some significant changes, however.
[RELATED_ARTICLE]For its reference design, Nvidia has streamlined the card’s GF108 GPU down from 144 CUDA processing cores to 96, while upping the graphics clock from 594 MHz to 810 MHz, and the processor clock from 1,189 MHz to 1,620 MHz. The new GT 440 also has a memory clock running at either 900 or 1,600 MHz, depending on the model, and can be configured with either 1GB of GDDR5 memory or 2GB of DDR3. Whereas the previous GT 440 supported two-way Scalable Link Interface (SLI) multicard setups, this one does not.
Other functionality remains more or less unchanged: Nvidia’s typical technologies, such as CUDA, 3D Vision, and PhysX, are still on hand, as is OpenGL 4.1. The single-slot card sports DVI, VGA, and HDMI ports on its bracket, and has a TDP of 65 watts.
A number of manufacturing companies are already producing their own versions of this card, including Asus, which overclocks the graphics clock to 822 MHz and utilizes its Super Alloy Power technology and dust-proof fan design to improve thermal performance increase lifespan. Gigabyte also increased the speed of the graphics clock to 830 MHz, the speed of the shader clock to 1,660 MHz, and added TurboCache to increase how much texture memory games can use; Zotac offers versions with either 512MB or 1GB of GDDR5 memory and a memory clock bumped up to 3,200 MHz.
No pricing for any of these cards was immediately available, but is expected to be between $70 and $100.
Copyright © 2010 Ziff Davis Publishing Holdings Inc.