Nvidia has today officially said that they will not be producing a 7800 GS board for PCI Express. A couple of weeks ago, anandtech got their hands on what showed to be a GS variant of the 7800 series. The card featured 16 pipes and had a core speed of 375 MHz. A number of people received these cards on accident in a contest, and have now been given the option of trading them in for 7800 GT's. Xbitlabs' site is even close to accurate, there should still be a large market for AGP cards based on current architectures.

We decided against covering this as it appeared to be fairly sensitive information, but the situation has been cleared today. Brian Burke from Nvidia PR, posted this on the NVnews forums:

"I want to clear up a bit of confusion about the GeForce 7800 GS PCI Express articles that have surfaced recently.

Without getting into the nitty gritty details, NVIDIA provides boards to our developers for their in house game development. These boards are meant for the sole purpose of inhouse engineering and QA. In the case of the recent GeForce 7800 GS PCI Express reviews that you may have seen, some of these developer boards were mistakenly given out to end users at an event the developers sponsored. These boards were never meant to ship in the open market.

NVIDIA has NO plans to release a commercially available GeForce 7800 GS PCI Express board. For any end users that many have received this board as a prize, NVIDIA will be happy to swap this out for a GeForce 7800 GT PCI Express board, or a GeForce 6800 GS PCI Express board, as these two boards are commercially available."

While this clearly axes the possibility of a PCI-E version of the card, the speculation is up on whether or not there's room for an AGP version of the card. If the poll on

If Nvidia are planning an AGP version of anything for the Holiday shopping season, they've missed the boat at this point, which many would consider to be a bad move, seeing as its been about a year and a half since the company has released a high-end, or near high-end AGP card. It could very well be that neither ATI or Nvidia have any plans whatsoever for releasing a new AGP card, in which case there will be a fairly large number of highly capable, current, but AGP crippled (if you can even call it that) systems, that will become obsolete for no reason other than the lack of a new video card that fits.

Again, it will be up to both companies to decide whether the slot gets the axe simply because it's an old (yet fully capable) standard, or if AGP owners will get one last upgrade round before they have to move to the new connector.

Article Link: GeForce 7800 GS AGP?

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