NVIDIA's consumer Fermi processors out

nVidia logoToday NVIDIA formally announced the launch of its consumer (read: PC gamer) version of the new Fermi silicon in the person of the GeForce GTX 470 and 480 cards. This is not the HPC platform that NVIDIA is launching later this year (which we reviewed here), so I don’t want to spend a lot of time on it. Instead I’ll point you to Randall Hand’s remarkably complete coverage of all things GTX-related over at VizWorld (there are many posts, but you might start here), or to NVIDIA’s release.

Some things to note: these cards do sport the new Fermi architecture, running at 1.4 or 1.2GHz (processor clock, 480 and 470 respectively). The two chips also sport 480/448 cores, and memory bandwidth of 177/134 GB/s. If you’ve got a spare $550 lying around  ($349 for the little brother) and plan to make use of NVIDIA’s high end Fermi when it comes out, you could do worse than to pick up one of these and log a little compile time.