A month ago, we reported about Nvidia’s intentions to construct a single-PCB, dual-GPU version of its 55nm enthusiast Geforce GTX 295 solution in order to bring manufacturing costs down.

This strategy would put the chipmaker in a better position financially for the time being, but as ATI’s 40nm generation begins to penetrate the retail market over summer season, we can definitely expect a counterattack from the green team with new 40nm GPUs and architecture in the fall.

In the meantime, the GTX 295 will keep its supremacy until at least the middle of Q3. Channel partners are running dry with stock of the dual-PCB version, most likely because Nvidia is trying to deplete its inventory to make way for the single-PCB replacement.

There is absolutely no difference in overall performance other than a slight bump in stock memory speed from 1000MHz on the dual-PCB design to 1100MHz on the single-PCB. More importantly, Nvidia is going to place both GT200b cores on a single printed circuit board just as ATI has been doing with its high-end X2 cards. This decision looks to be a first for the green giant suffering financial shock, and we are interested to find out if the new implementation offers any thermal performance advantages.

The new card is based on the P658 PCB and measures a staggering eleven inches in length, or half an inch longer than most high-end cards today. It still takes up two slots and retains the same 576MHz core clock speed, 1242MHz shaders, but 1100MHz GDDR3 memory at 896MB x 2. The price remains unchanged, so expect nothing more than a condensed design with broader availability beginning around the middle of May.