Nvidia Corp. is reportedly preparing a yet another dual-chip graphics card that will be competing against ATI Radeon HD 4870 X2. The new board is projected to be based on 55nm version of the GeForce GTX 200 chip, but although its precise specifications are unclear, its market prospects are under big question mark.

The new GeForce GX2 graphics board will powered by two G200 chips produced using 55nm process technology (55nm version of G200 is also known as G200b, GT200b, GT206, G200 revision B, etc) with 216 stream processing units enabled, according to a news-story by Expreview web-site. It is expected that the new graphics board will deliver performance close to that of two GeForce GTX 260-216 graphics cards.

While performance of two overclocked GeForce GTX 260-216 graphics boards is higher compared to the ATI Radeon HD 4870 X2, it is highly likely that Nvidia will try to be conservative about the clock-speeds of the chips. As a result, the advantage of the new GX2 – which is due only in Q1 2009 – over the graphics card that will have been on the market for about half a year by mid-January.

Given that Nvidia is known for rather surprising behaviour, it is highly likely that the new dual-GPU board will feature higher performance than anticipated. Perhaps, Nvidia plans to enable 240 stream processing units in every graphics processor, or maybe the new G200b chip sports 256 stream processing units and is capable of very high clock-speeds, which would tangibly increase performance compared to the existing GeForce GTX 280.

Nvidia did not comment on the news-story.

Tags: Nvidia, Geforce, 55nm, 65nm, G200b, GT206, GX2