As many probably know already, vendors are not supposed to market their very new 55nm GeForce GTX 260 boards in any way which will make it possible to distinguish them from 65nm cards, at least not until NVIDIA gets rid of the old ones. So, don't expect their partners to wave a giant flag with 55nm on it, NVIDIA won't stand for it. However you can always count on price search engines and their industrious and meticulous staff to do it for them. So the card ends up listed with 55nm in its name, and the GPU is designated as the GT200b. EVGA has informed us that they will be the first with the GeForce GTX 260 Core 216 cards based on the 55nm chips in various versions, at least in Europe. - FudZilla

First 55nm GT200b Based GeForce GTX 260 Available

This doesn't come as a surprise, as EVGA is not the only big one to support NVIDIA only, as XFX has defected to ATI and BFG is not that big as it used to be. There will be at least three models of the new 55nm based GeForce GTX 260 boards, meaning the reference clocked, SuperClocked and Super SuperClocked cards. Again Flextronics makes the cards, and these cards should have some very good overclocking capabilities. NVIDIA usually uses Flextronics for its first time to market production batch and EVGA decided to get the first ones, and we don't believe that they had any choice, but that is just common practise.

So we found the cards listed in Austria, the SuperClocked being listed to run at 626MHz clock speed. Whereas the Super SuperClocked should work at, at least 666MHz, while we do suspect that it might even reach 700MHz. The cards are shipping as of early this week and there is a tiny chance you might have one to put under the Christmas tree. This will be the third version of the GeForce GTX 260 products, as the first one has 192 shaders, the second one is again a 65nm chip with 216 shaders, and finally the one that is available as of this week, the GeForce GTX 260 with 55nm chip and 216 shaders.