NVIDIA is planning to have its 55nm GT200 cards in retail and/or etail by early December. The company has started shipping these chips a few weeks ago and evaluation boards have been manufactured a few weeks ago too. Now the wait is purely logistic as it takes a long time to get the cards from Taiwan and China back to the western world. We learned that new cards should overclock better, but the first wave will be clocked at the same speeds as the GeForce GTX 260, with 216 shaders and we suspect that the GeForce GTX 280 cards will also get a new 55nm chip. The new chip should have drastically lower power consumption, should overclock higher and luckily we won't have to wait much more. - FudZilla

NVIDIA's 55nm GT200 Show Up In Retail In December

The new NVIDIA driver 180 definitely makes the GeForce GTX 260 much more attractive than any time before as the card's performance was boosted with the new driver, and now it can really fight Radeon HD 4870. We've asked around and learned that despite the driver's halo effect on the market, it really didn't affect current GeForce GTX 260 sales as much as the company would like. It is moving slower than people would like it to move but this is probably the reality of channel that is traditionally not that fast with transitions. And that is a bit normal as you can't just swing the minds to the same product with an inventive technique.

Sales are definitely getting slightly better, but it takes times to regain customer confidence really. Whoever is buying a GeForce GTX 260 and alike performance products usually knows well what they are doing and they are still in the process of evaluation. Though the bottom line is that this driver is making a difference and therefore it should affect the GeForce GTX 260 Core 216 version sales.