Nvidia quietly reveals new GeForce GT 440

Earlier this month, the big news from Nvidia was all about their upcoming budget range of GeForce GT 430 1Gb cards, of which we have reviewed Inno3D’s flavour. Through all this though, it seems that Nvidia have sneakily been releasing their new range of cards, namely the GeForce GT 440, into the OEM market to give manufacturers a DirectX-11 compatible card for mid-range PC use.

Going by release specifications, the card is to come in two specifications, but this only varies in the memory specification.

The graphics clock is set to 594MHz and with the processor clock at 1189MHz & 144 CUDA cores, this is buy no means a basic card. As mentioned, the memory is where this card has 2 variations, one aimed to make the card an affordable option with 1.5Gb of GDDR3 at an effective 1600MHz clock and the other option designed as a high end option with 3Gb of GDDR3 at an effective clock of 1800MHz.

Both options are packing a 192 bit-memory bus and 43.2Gb/sec of bandwidth, but the 3Gb option does seem to be a bit overkill, considering the memory clock is not that much greater than the 1.5Gb’s, but this will inevitably help out OEM manufacturers & Nvidia stand out on the specification sheets for the retail market.

The cards are SLi ready but their only support is with an identical card from the same manufacturer. The cards are supporting of Nvidia’s PureVideo® and CUDA™ technologys and are also PhysX™ ready so are more than capable on paper of HD video. As standard, the cards come with HDMI, VGA, and DVI connectors and support a maximum resolution of 2560 x 1600 over the digital ports and 2048 x 1536 over the analogue VGA.

The HMDI port supports 1.4a and GPU accelerated Blu-Ray 3D (Playback requires a compatible software player) but x.v.Color, HDMI Deep Color and 7.1 digital surround sound will be added in a Release 260 driver.

With all these features in mind, the boards are designed with a single slot fitment and the total power draw from the system is a mere 56W which in turn keeps the cooler sizes down to a minimum.

Only thing that is missing from Nvidia’s information is the exact price of this card, however with the card aimed at OEM’s rather than the retail market, the cost should be kept quite low.

What’s you view on this new quiet release from Nvidia? Post you thoughts below.