During our morning stroll through the isles of European e-tailers, we stumbled upon Nvidia's new-old low end baby, the 9300GS.
Early reports indicated that the 9300GS will be merely a rebranded 8400GS, but this doesn't seem to be the case. It appears there will be a 55nm and 65nm version, and this particular card is based on a 55nm G98 core. There will still be a lot of rebranded 65nm G86 cards out there, until vendors get rid of the old cores, so we've got the 9800GT 55nm/65nm conundrum all over again.
Like its predecessor, the G98 features 16 stream processors and 8 texture units, but ends up clocked a bit higher. The core runs at 567MHz core, while the shader clock is bumped up to 1400MHz, a full 500MHz faster than the 65nm 8400GS. It has 256MB of DDR2 memory on a 64-bit memory interface so don't expect much in terms of performance, after all this is as low as low end gets.
The price stays in the €30 neighborhood and the cards should be available within days. OEMs and system integrators will probably love them, as they'll let them stick 9 series graphics into their systems at half the price of 9500GT cards.
You can check out the listing here.
G98 and a pinch of confusion for €30
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