Supposed pictures of the Nvidia GTX280 appear

(n4g) -- Chinese website itocp.com has scored what is said to be the first pictures of the upcoming Geforce GTX280, although it's hard to see any details as the pictures are tiny. There's a larger picture of the GPU itself and it lists the model number as G200-300-A2.

This is of course an engineering sample as final production cards are almost a month away. If these pictures are of a real card, then they confirm the earlier mechanical drawings that turned up and the card does indeed feature an additional chip towards the front of the card.

It looks very similar to the 8800 GTX, but it uses one 6-pin and one 8-pin power connector, so it's quite clear that this is a different card. The memory layout is also different as the card has eight memory chips per side for a total of 16 compared to 12 for the 8800 GTX. The SLI connectors also appear to be slightly different, as well as the power regulation area.