55nm Zotac GTX 260 pictured and described.

And it's still huge!!

The ram move to the front should help RAM overclocking (which is already pretty awesome)

I don't know all those chip together will will just concentrate that heat closer and the cooler might or might not dissipate it, may be a cooler redesign is next.
Yea that chip is still on the same real estate.

Glad to see they put the power supply connectors on the side of the card instead of the back. So what is the difference except for the die shrink, a little less power use and saves nvida money.....that is about it.

yea I saw this news on Fudzilla, I was wonder i hear all this talk about 260gx2 and 55nm 260gtx but what about the 280gtx 55nm

been a while since i o'clocked video cards...but i forgot what having the chips on the same side do :scratch:

One step in the right direction. Well done NV. Now all we need you to do is keep traveling in that direction and everything will turn out right.

I have no doubt that this is a step in the right direction - slightly cheaper,cooler?, and better overclocking. However, what about when the GTX295 (which uses this core revision)comes out? Sure it will most likely destroy ATI's card, but at what cost, not just to purchase the card, but to keep it running! I'm sure the electricity to bill would start to climb or go through the roof. Although most people that have money to spend on these cards should have enough to pay any bills.

ATI always seem more power efficient and cheaper than NV, but they do need more than 800 SP's to compete with NV in the performance department(Yes I know they are a different architecture and use different programming methods) . Now imagine an NV GPU with 800 SP's, energy efficient, great cooling, with a respectable price (Yes, it is hard to imagine, especially the last part, but who cares).

They're closer to the fan then so they get more air blown over them

d'oh..makes sense for people who run them stock..i always use a custom cooling solution for me hw :)
danke for the clearing.

I see some good oc'ing headroom in store for that card :D

Well I'm disappointing to see that they still have the Power in the top side of the board, they really need rotate them 90 degrees right, facing the drive bays! my Zotac 8800GTs do that and it just makes for better organization when it comes to cable management!

@Naito

It's a difference in how ATI uses their shaders over nVidia. nVidia uses them strictly for shader ops (and now PhysX support) but not much beyond that. They still stay old-school with most bump-mapping and other effects done in the ROPs (which is why they have such huge numbers still). ATI does most of their image quality stuff with the shader processors. All Anti-Aliasing and Anisotropic filtering runs through the saders as well as bump-mapping and normal shader code. This is what makes it very difficult to compare these cards by raw specs. Theoretically speaking nVidia should stomp an ugly mud-hole in ATI but due to a more efficient way of handling things ATI can hold it's own. Until you actually use an ATI driver then you're pretty much screwed.

@SpacemanSpiff

I knew ATI used different process to render things etc, but not to that level of detail. Thanks for the insight.

So to summarize what you just said, your saying ATI's stream processors are not 'crapper' or less powerful than NV's, but since they process a lot more data, ATI needs to more than triple the number of SP's than what NV use, to make up the difference in performance.

Sorry if what I just said is completely the opposite to what your were trying to explain. However, if that is what you were saying, I believe that it's a very good way to render and process data etc.

"Until you actually use an ATI driver then you're pretty much screwed." I'm not really sure what you meant by this, but isn't it the drivers that usually let ATI down. My previous experience of ATI's were hampered by their drivers (and a very unstable X1950Pro, although that doesn't really count in this discussion, because it was produced before the move to Unified Shaders).

Maybe ATI can improve their performance by adding some eDRAM on the same package as the GPU. It'll make them a little more expensive, but Nvidia isn't exactly cheap either.

Has ATI removed Vertex Pipelines from their R700 generation GPU's?
http://www.gpureview.com/ati-rv770-chip-151.html