GeForce GTX 570 expected December 7th

To coincide with WoW Cataclysm

THE MORE AFFORDABLE sibling to the GeForce GTX 580 should arrive in a little bit over a week’s time, at least according to a product information sheet with embargo details that has turned up online. The GeForce GTX 570 as the new card will be known as appears to be a little bit of a gamble from Nvidia’s side.

Sweclockers is the source of the leaked product information sheet and Palit is the company that’s been a little bit too eager to send out information about its upcoming GeForce GTXX 570 card. We’ve also managed to verify at least the card specifications, although we haven’t been able to verify the actual launch date which according to the information at Sweclockers is the 7th of December. This happens to be the same day that World of Warcraft Cataclysm goes live, which might be a happy coincidence for Nvidia.

The card itself doesn’t appear to differ much from the GTX 470/480 in terms of design and as such you’ll find a pair of DVI ports as well as a mini HDMI connector. The power consumption is said to be 225W, that’s about 10W higher than what the GTX 470 is rated at. The cooling also appears to be somewhat similar, although the fact that Palit is stating that the card will have “Quieter Thermal Solution” suggests that the GTX 570 will use the same vapour chamber cooling technology as the GTX 580.

In terms of specifications, the GTX 570 seems to end up somewhere between the GTX 480 and the GTX 470, albeit with higher clock speeds. The card has two 6-pin power connectors, just like the GTX 470 and it also uses the same 320-bit memory bus as the GTX 470. However, just as with the GTX 580 the shader count was increased and as such the GTX 570 has 480 shaders, the same as the GTX 480. The stock GPU clock speed is 732MHz with the shaders coming in at 1464MHz, that’s 32 and 64MHz respectively compared to the GTX 480. Finally the 1280MB of GDDR5 memory has an effective clock speed of 3.8GHz, that’s 100MHz faster than the GTX 480, albeit you get less memory on a narrower bus.

So far there are no performance figures available, but it seems like the GTX 570 is a bit of an oddity, as it’s clocked faster than a GTX 480, yet the narrower memory bus and the dual 6-pin power connectors suggests that it won’t be able to compete with the GTX 480 in terms of performance. Then again, we can’t see anyone that owns a GTX 480 opting for a GTX 570 and not even GTX 470 would gain that much performance on moving to a GTX 570. However, those that have held off and waited might opt for the GTX 570 over a GTX 580, as it should end up being a fair bit cheaper than the $500 or so you’ll have to spend on a GTX 580. We’d guess the GTX 570 will end up priced somewhere around the $400 mark, as it’s unlikely that it’ll be as expensive as the GTX 480 which is still commanding well over $400.S|A

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