With the imminent arrival of NVIDIA’s new G80 graphics cards, it is no secret that information has been leaking left and right about it.  For the most part, I can’t verify or deny anything that you read because of NDA’s, but check back here about a weeks time to find all the official answers.  I still can point to various rumors though!  🙂

This first story from the Inquirer seems to think that NVIDIA is going to modeling a Playboy Playmate model to show off their new hardware.  Wouldn’t that be a hell of a way to get the average gamer’s attention?  Another story over there points to a chip that is 700 million transistors in size and is just plain HUGE!  SLI might see a change to a two-connector system according to an NVNews.net post probably for the same reasons ATI/AMD moved to it with the X1950 Pro card.   The mention of 1.5 GHz clocks rates seems a bit out line though even with a much different processing engine at the G80’s core. 

Finally, this article points to Asus being the reference board designer behind the G80 cards sent out to reviewer’s and to other card vendors.  The Inqiuirer’s quote is below, but since I have a sample here, I looked at the card for some standard markings that I have come to recognize from Asus’ products.  Finding nothing on it, I called NVIDIA to ask about the issue, since they told me they had made the cards themselves.  NVIDIA 120% denied that Asus was the designer or producer of the G80 reference cards and that the Inq article was just flat out wrong.  I am tempted to side with NVIDIA here, though they wouldn’t give official statements about any of the other rumors floating around the site. 

USUALLY MSI does reference designs for Nvidia cards. But we are surprised to learn that Asus came a long way and has created the reference system for Nvidia this time round.

Both G80 cards, Geforce 8800 GTS and GTX are designed by Asus.

The first batch of cards will be differentiated by a sticker on the cooler. GTX is bigger and has two power connectors while GTS has single power connector and is shorter. They both have the same massive cooler.