Amazon puts up first GTX480 card for pre-order

Zotac is one of the blessed few

THE FIRST CONFIRMED Fermi GPU graphics card pricing comes courtesy of none other than giant online retailer Amazon and its partner in sales is Zotac. The card carries a couple of small Zotac stickers, but apart from that it seems to be the bog standard reference design.

The GPU is clocked at 700MHz with the shaders at 1401MHz. The card also has 1536MB of 384-bit GDDR5 memory with an effective clock speed of 3696MHz. The card has a pair of dual-link DVI connectors with HDCP support as well as that peculiar mini-HDMI 1.3a connector. Zotac supplies the card with a pair of power adaptors, a DVI to D-sub adapter and a handy mini-HDMI to HDMI adapter.

With only hours to go until the official unveiling and hopefully a few unbiased reviews appearing on the web, we’re curious if Amazon will get in trouble for leaking the pricing ahead of the launch. It will also be interesting to see what price range these cards will sell for, since the Zotac card appears to be in line with the rumoured MSRP, something that isn’t always followed when a new product that there’s likely to be a high demand for first appears on sale.

The GTX470 should also be unveiled today with a rumoured MSRP of $349.99, but again, we’ll have to wait and see if this card meets or exceeds this price point. No wonder AMD isn’t too concerned about the pricing of its cards, as the Radeon HD 5870 can be had for under $400 if you shop around and don’t mind a reference design card, while the 5850 can be had for just under $300. Nvidia’s cards are rumoured to be slightly faster, but the question is if either will be fast enough for anyone to really worry about it, or want to pay extra.S|A

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