NVIDIA is gearing up after playing it a bit too cool over the last few months, and is now ready to launch the third member of the Fermi family. NVIDIA’s GF106 GPU will find a home with the new GeForce GTS 450 graphics card, and it has now been caught in the nude.
Asian site ZOL ran across a naked GeForce GTS 450 and photographed the graphics circuit, which also revealed that NVIDIA has shrunk the GF106 even further from bigger brother GF104, found in GeForce GTX 460.
The square die looks to measure around 15.2-15.7mm per side, which results in a surface of about 240mm^2. Clearly smaller than GF104 and its 366mm^2, but still considerably bigger than AMD Juniper (166mm^2) that is expected to be the main contender in the Radeon HD 5700 series.
The graphics circuit is branded GF106-250-KA-A1 and will not be used with any reference designs from Nvidia. It will be up to the partners to make the circuit boards for the new mid-range circuit and beside GTS 450 there are talks about two siblings, GTS 445 and GTS 440. More information on these is currently not available, but the performance of GeForce GTS 450 is said to match that of GeForce GTS 260.
