End of the road for GTX470?

KitGuru’s sources in Taiwan have told us that nVidia has stopped taking orders for the GeForce GTX 470 card. Is this a temporary measure or has it been killed off less than 2 months after its launch on March 26^th?

There’s no doubt that Fermi has huge potential. Its complexity and, in any ways, forward looking technology is interesting to KitGurus around the globe.

That said, not every flavour of Fermi will be a success.

On Wednesday, KitGuru heard that, for now, no more orders are being taken for the nVidia GeForce GTX470.

If true, that would make it one of the shortest lived graphic cards in history. But what's the full picture?

When KitGuru broke the earlier story that nVidia appeared to be using GTX470 PCB production for the new GTX465, it immediately raised a question mark about why the GTX470 production line no longer needed them.

Jay Puri,  Executive Vice President of World Wide Sales, is a wise man at nVidia and any decision to drop superfluous lines will have been given the go ahead by him. Same goes for product branching. Unfortunately, so far, he has not been available to comment on our report.

KitGuru has learned that nVidia will look to spice up the Fermi range with a sexy GTX465 card with a lower price and strong performance figures. Now we need to see how it measures up against the Radeon HD 5850. If that move is successful, does that call the future of the GTX470 into question?

KitGuru UPDATE: Word has now reached us of a 375w, dual-GPU, GTX490. If true, then that could explain any reluctance to take new orders for the GTX470. nVidia could have choosen to move its GTX470 cores to the new GTX490 card, while it positions the 200w GTX465 chip against AMD's Radeon HD 5850.

We're still as keen as mustard to see if the GTX465, armed with 1GB of 256-bit GDDR5, will be enough to win that battle.

For now, it may not be the end of the road for the GTX470 – instead a well placed fork could be in order.

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