nVidia kills off GTX490, pumps out GTX590 for CeBIT

Shoppers are lucky. They go into a store, see what they want and buy it. They are safe from having ‘too much knowledge' about what goes on behind the scenes. Sausage eaters are the same. Stick it in your mouth and don't ask. Unfortunately, KitGuru seems to be a hub for rumour dropping and negative briefings as much as cool kit and cold hard fact. Rest assured dear reader, every spoon these PR wizards try to feed us gets mulled over and cross-referenced several times before we hit the send button.

Several months ago, we ran a story comparing the GTX480 against the Radeon HD 6870. AMD's complete re-write of the entire Radeon naming strategy left everyone confused and we had to do a serious re-write for it to make any sense at all.

At this point in time, we're fairly sure that the card we're talking about will be the Radeon HD 6970.

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Stories appearing today on sites like Bit-Tech, are referencing a Chinese site called ZOL.com which has predicted that the new Radeon HD 6970 will rise to 23,499 in 3DMark Vantage.

Does 23,499 look familiar?

Looks an awful lot like the bar we charted months ago.

In the face of this onslaught, nVidia has rethought its plans.

We now understand that the dual GPU GTX490 (that we had all expected to arrive before Northern Islands) has been carried out of the back door at nVidia's Santa Clara HQ. Its career as the world's fastest graphics card was not as much short as it was non-existant.

Here's a picture of what we believed to be an ASUS GTX490 PCB that we published back in July.

KitGuru has now spoken with 2 of nVidia's biggest partners and what we're hearing is that the standard chips will all be refreshed ahead of any multi-GPU experimentation.The PCB designs may well be the same, but a second generation Fermi will not toast the components anywhere near as much.

We are predicting that, if you have a decent SLR and a ticket to CeBIT for the first week in March 2011, then you can expect to see dual GPU GTX590 cards on several nVidia partner stands.That's exactly 12 months after Fermi was first shown properly in public.

KitGuru says: We will plant some more ‘Flags of our Predictions' next week. Given the apparently stunning accuracy of our estimates for the performance capability of the Radeon HD 6970, we're looking to repeat that exercise with equal precision!

Tell us we're right/wrong below.

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