A few hours ago, Nvidia Senior PR Manager Brian Burke uploaded on the company’s Facebook page a picture of what appears to be the first working sample of a 40nm GF100 high-end card based on Fermi architecture, the first to make its way on the internet.



Original size

The image was uploaded at 9:45pm PST and depicts the Geforce desktop card running Uningine’s Heaven DirectX 11 benchmark on a Dell 24-inch monitor, so we can rationally assume that the benchmark resolution is 1920x1200. The core hardware configuration appears to be composed of an ASUS Rampage II Extreme LGA 1366 motherboard coupled with undetermined Core i7 processor and DDR3 memory. It comes as no surprise that the image was leaked around the same time that AMD posted its official Radeon HD 5970 press release. In the world of IT business marketing strategy, we can only assume that the green giant wants to ensure its ardent enthusiast consumers that Fermi-based Geforce desktop cards do exist and are confirmed to be working, especially after its "Fermi mock-up" debacle at GTC 2009.

Upon close inspection in Photoshop and with the help of others, it appears that the 40nm Fermi-based GF100 monster is using a PCI-Express 8-pin adapter on the left and a 6-pin adapter on the right, so nothing is new in terms of PSU hardware requirements for enthusiast consumers. It is important to note that this particular engineering sample GPU is using the recently taped-out A2 silicon. Our multiple internal sources have previously confirmed that the company will move to A3 silicon for its final retail products.

Two days ago, Nvidia publicly demonstrated its first working GPU samples based on Fermi architecture during SC 2009 (Super Computer Convention). SC is the international conference for high-performance computing, networking, storage and analysis, where the company unveiled the Tesla 20-series lineup priced respectively between $2,499 and $18,995. As previously stated, these Fermi GPUs catered toward the High Performance Computing (HPC) market segment are not expected to launch in Q2 2010, while the high-end Geforce desktop units as depicted in the image above are expected to be announced shortly after CES 2010 passes (January 7th – 10th) and will launch earlier, sometime in Q1 2010.