During a recent interview, the marketing manager of Gigabyte’s graphics division, Liu Mengzong has confirmed we’ll be seeing their version of the GTX 880 (the G1 Gaming) released in September this year.
Liu Mengzong also confirmed they’re working on a brand new version of their popular WindForce cooler, and the 450W of heat it will be shifting will easily be enough for the Maxwell architecture. Despite this, Gigabyte might also release another version of WindForce, capable of a rather astounding 650W. This level is far beyond what Maxwell will require however (around double to triple the TDP of the GTX 880).
Mr. Mengzong confirmed that we’ll be seeing the new Maxwell based GeForce GTX 880 cards released by the end of next month (September), but there is a slight possibility that things could slip to October. Let’s hope Nvidia don’t end up with a soft launch, shall we?
If you’re scratching your head and wondering where’s the information regarding specs, Liu Mengzong, or Gigabyte as a whole aren’t willing to give us information as yet. We do know that Maxwell will of course operate far cooler than Maxwell, but there’s little confirmed for the GM204.
Rumor has it that we’ll be seeing the cards launched with 4GB of GDDR5 RAM, and this will be on a 256-Bit memory interface. Questions immediately are raised concerning clock speed of the RAM however. Some speculation is floating around that an 8GB version will appear in the market, possibly with a wider memory interface (say 512 Bit) but that’s pure speculation.
The number of CUDA cores, their clock speed, TMU’s, ROPS and all of the other essential information is still in the clouds at the moment. It’s safe to make the bet that we’ll be seeing a part that for the most part is faster than virtually all of the Keplar’s (so say the GTX 780) but whether this translates into faster than say a GTX 780 Ti remains a mystery.
Although we don’t know the specific pricing, the MSRP is expected to be no higher than $450 US Dollars (and with the really helpful UK pricing of GPU’s, I’d suspect a few pennies less than that in Sterlin).
So there you have it – confirmation that the Maxwell GeForce GTX 880 will indeed see a release this September. But as to if it’s worthy of a purchase, or you should hold out for say the ‘bleeding edge’ (let’s say the GTX 880 Ti, or the new Titan) remains a mystery.
If you’re in the market for a GPU in the 500 dollar price range, and can wait a few months then you might as well. On the other hand, if you’re buying at the lower end (say 250 dollars) this won’t mean much to you – for now.
Source EXPReview
