NVIDIA’s NV45

NVIDIA’s PCI Express GeForce 6800 Ultra, tentatively codenamed NV45, made a stealth arrival at Computex. We say “tentatively codenamed” because NVIDIA’s plans for this board are constantly changing. Here are two pictures we snagged:

NV45 in all her glory

NV45 connector

As of right now, the NV45 boards looks largely identical to today’s reference NV40 design. The biggest difference you’ll note is the new power connector configuration: the two Molex connectors present on NV40 are gone on NV45, replaced instead with a single connector. This should appease enthusiasts who are short on power connections. As we mentioned earlier, board partners will continue to bundle power adapters with their PCI Express boards, so supplying the card with juice shouldn’t be a problem.

The first NV45 boards aren’t currently expected to hit retail until the end of summer, early fall. We were told September would be the most likely ship date, but as always, plans can change. Clock speeds will be similar to the AGP version, so don’t expect any radical performance difference between NV40 and today’s “NV45”. We have a feeling NVIDIA will work hard on improving NV45’s specs though, similar to NV35 and NV38.

NVIDIA’s more immediate PCI Express plans are GeForce PCX 5750 and PCX 5300, which are based on the GeForce FX 5700 and GeForce FX 5200 series respectively. NVIDIA has also announced a PCI Express PCX 5950 part, but we haven’t seen many of these boards on the show floor (the SFF system Biostar submitted for the invitational event was powered by a PCX 5900 though), so we don’t expect them to be as popular at the retail level.

Besides graphics cards, NVIDIA also announced its nStant Media, which is part of its ForceWare driver suite. nStant Media is designed to give users quick access to the multimedia content on their PCs. Say for instance, you’re looking for a picture you took on vacation last week. Rather than booting up your system, loading the OS, and finding the file, with nStant Media you can find the file without powering up your system. This technology is similar to the Jukebox functionality found in many of today’s motherboards, where you can listen to audio CDs without having to boot up the system (nStant Media can perform this function also).

At the press of a button, a graphical user interface loads up giving you access to all your media files, even ones that are on separate partitions. You can also listen to music or watch DVDs from here as well. The GUI currently loads up in about ten seconds, although NVIDIA is working to reduce this even further.

NVIDIA’s nStant Media press release suggests that the technology is meant solely for laptops, although we were assured by NVIDIA’s Andrew Fear that the technology can be adopted for any market, including small form factor PCs, handheld devices, and conventional desktop PCs.

That’s a wrap

Now that you know ATI and NVIDIA’s strategy for this summer, we’ll next go over the plans of ATI and NVIDIA’s board partners. We saw quite a few interesting designs from both ATI and NVIDIA’s camps, so you’ll want to check back for part two to see how the board partners are innovating beyond the standard reference setup. We think you’ll be surprised by some of the developments! Our plane for the states leaves in a few hours though, so we’ve got to get packing!