Aquired another nvidia eng sample

Picked up this GTX260. The first thing that is intersting about it is that its a reference PCB with native HDMI out. This is done via an Analogix chip on the pcb. You will notice the blank soilder pads for this on other reference 200 series cards. The second thing is that it appears to be the 12th GTX260 ever made. Third GPUZ shows this card as having 240 cuda cores as opposed to 216 or 192. It does appear to perform inbetween my other 260s and my 280's about like a 275. This is a 65nm part. Made in the USA by flextronics. This is the forth Nvidia engineering sample I now own, including the 17th GTX280, 29th GTX280, and 47th GTX280. I have attached some photos below.

Maybe some of you Nvidia guys will know the meaning behind the stickers, etc.?

I'm pretty sure that's a DisplayPort, not HDMI. That's kinda interesting since DisplayPort production started in 2008, the same year the GTX260 was released. So it seems nVidia was at least experimenting with the new interface on their new GPUs at the time.

Well, I do know what most of the stickers mean, but unfortunately cannot tell you .

How did you get these boards?! (don't worry, I don't work for NVIDIA anymore, and my only obligation to them now is to keep their secrets)

It does look like display port, but Im almost sure I had an HDMI cable hooked into the 280 board once.
I get them by paying very close attention anytime I see one for sale.
Is there anything interesting that you can tell me about the development of these cards? I literally have spreadsheets of information regarding the 200 series, down to the pinouts of the fan controllers, the vt1165 voltage controller etc. I would love to broaden my knowledge, even though its 8 year old tech. GT200a is still the largest die manufactured by nvidia or glofo

mxthunder said:

It does look like display port, but Im almost sure I had an HDMI cable hooked into the 280 board once.
I get them by paying very close attention anytime I see one for sale.
Is there anything interesting that you can tell me about the development of these cards? I literally have spreadsheets of information regarding the 200 series, down to the pinouts of the fan controllers, the vt1165 voltage controller etc. I would love to broaden my knowledge, even though its 8 year old tech. GT200a is still the largest die manufactured by nvidia or glofo

Click to expand...

Ahh. I wouldn't have thought anyone at NVIDIA would actually steal those cards and sell them on eBay, but I guess it's a big company. Those cards are never sold to anyone, not even employees (employees can buy cards used in some testing runs at a high discount, but this is not one of those cards), so any on the market must have been stolen. Employees are allowed to borrow those cards for personal use with manager's permission (in case the card is still needed for some testing, etc), but I guess managers don't usually bother keeping track of those cards since they always have more important things to worry about.

NVIDIA doesn't really care about old engineering samples that much and there are always tons of them. They are usually just piled up in the labs after a product has been released. We only went back to them if there is a problem with the product, and we need to go back and verify something, etc. For the most part they just sit there collecting dust. But it's technically still stealing.

It's quite likely that you actually know more about those cards than I do, since I wasn't there back in the days of the 200 series (I was only involved in Keplers), so all I know about them is from casual chatting with other people, and we didn't really talk about old products that much. I never looked at the design files for 200 series (and of course don't have access to them anymore).

It is a display port, can always tell by the "clipped corner", you can get the adapter fit to use it as an HDMI port though.