Sources close to NVIDIA have confirmed that there will be a GeForce GTX 285, a faster 55nm based GeForce GTX 280 card with slightly higher clock and they even went out and said that it will be available in January. And yes January is also the time for real availability of the GeForce GTX 260 cards at 55nm, but in all fairness, you might be lucky enough to get some of these cards in Europe or Japan before the end of this year. Cause since yesterday EVGA has already supplied retails stores with some batches of their 55nm based cards, which are for sell at this moment. Though stock might be low for now, if you find one just go for it as these will give some nice overclocking headroom. - FudZilla

NVIDIA Confirms 55nm Based GeForce GTX 285 Card!

The new GeForce GTX 285 card should be clocked at 648MHz core, 1476MHz shaders and 2484MHz memory, at least that is what our sources believe. The card has 32 raster operating units, 80 texture units and 240 shaders, but this time around the card's thermal design power is only 183W, while the GeForce GTX 280 had one of 236W, with a 602MHz core clock, 1296MHz shaders and 2200MHz memory. We are sure that someone might be capable of launching a GeForce GTX 285 clocked at 700MHz and maybe a bit more, with a little help in the overclocking department which will bring some great gaming performance.

NVIDIA wants to continue its big monolithic, high-end strategy as this might be a better thing than the two chip approach used by ATI. This strategy didn't actually work well this time round, as NVIDIA was pushed to launch the GeForce GTX 295, a card with two 55nm GT200b chips simply as its single high-end GeForce GTX 280 cards at 65nm was not enough to beat ATI's dual chip X2 card. Next generation high-end, the one that comes after the GeForce GTX 285 and dual chip GeForce GTX 295, will again be a big chip but it looks that NVIDIA keeps a dual card approach as a reserve that can help it fight against ATI once again.

We expect that the next chip, the one that comes after the 55nm GT200b, will again be a similar chipset with shaders clocked higher than the GPU clock and many parallel stream processors at higher clock, but we know very little about this 40nm chip. Though we will keep our ears open just in case.