More details on NVIDIA Fermi - price, PSU requirements and more

TweakTown's own video card guru, Shane Baxtor has acquired some more specific details about NVIDIA's upcoming Fermi powered GTX 470, one of their first two DX11-ready cards to hit the market in answer to AMD's top-end HD 5800/5900 series.

With the very active rumour mill giving a hint that NVIDIA plan to make a big announcement regarding Fermi within the next 12 hrs, Shane gets an early scoop on the pricing and PSU requirements for the GTX 470. He learns that the official launch price looks to be $299 USD which sits in line with AMD's HD 5850, though performance is expected to be more around HD 5870 levels.



Power wise, NVIDIA is apparently slapping on a minimum requirement of 550 Watt, up slightly from AMD's min requirement on the HD 5850 at 500 Watt. In any case, it shouldn't matter to most people wanting a card like this, knowing full well that a quality PSU with plenty of headroom makes for a much more stable gaming rig.

In a separate posting, Shane is confident NVIDIA will announce their launch date for the Fermi cards within the next 12 or so hours which the rumour mill is indicating will be mid to late March. He also feels there may be an availability issue on the horizon with these cards due to the 1 year warranty that NVIDIA gives to its AIBs as opposed to a lot of the AMD cards on the market with warranties of two years or more. This will make NV partners reluctant to carry a lot of stock of the cards as they know they'll need to offer 2 year warranties to stay competitive, but have fear of a lot of dead ones coming back to haunt them after the 1 year NV covered warranty period is up.

More on Shane's insight to this here.