:s you work in distribution then? have direct contacts with AMD? no....i do and believe me they haven't released any info on the 6 series yet.
Yeah, people working for a UK distribution company will be around the last to know of actual specs/info. The likes of Club3d, Sapphire, His, Powercolor will have had cards for a while now, even some of them won't know final specs. Lets say for example the 6870 launches with 2000 shaders, 900Mhz, 2gb mem at 1.6Ghz. Now they might have sent Powercolor a test card thats 2000 shaders, 850Mhz, 2gb mem, 1.45Ghz memory speeds, at the same time they send Sapphire a 1800 shader 950Mhz, 2gb mem, 1.6Ghz card.
If suddenly some site confirms a leak with either set of exact specs, they know the leak is with one company or another. In reality every day the cards get closer to launch, more samples are sent out to more companies, Dell, Hp, Apple will have them, they also value their NDA's and will do everything to protect them.
As for releasing false information, AMD have CONFIRMED they do this, read up on the launch of the 5870, eyefinity was kept in strict secret till days before launch, they go into detail of how they kept it to a minimum of driver people for ages and gradually added people to the inner circle as and when needed, partners and many people didn't know till absolutely necessary.
This is from someone who has signed a few AMD(well ATi, infact one AMD one iirc aswell) NDA in the past. Though they were less secretive back then they were VERY cagey about telling us final specs, saw nekkid cards, got a general idea of performance, I really can't remember but this was probably 2-3months before the actual launch. In NO WAY am I suggesting I know anything inside about this gen, haven't been in the reviewing business for ages now, mostly just got very very boring, with zero gain. Back in the days without that many sites, hardware to review + keeping a lot of it wasn't particularly surprising, with the explosion of review sites, it became for instance for a AMD cpu review, send out mobo/mem/cpu combo, have a couple days, send on to next reviewer and it eventually ended up at one of the bigger sites who got to keep it. The big sites play VERY dirty, "we'll review your mobo if you use some of your years advertising budget with us and we'll plaster your name all over the site, no money this year? no review either" .
Personally, educated guess, Nvidia are boned, AMD will have the fastest cards and the most profitable cards at every price/performance point and can drop prices further than Nvidia can at every price point because they can do it with smaller cores.
the 460gtx is some 30% slower than a 5850, and its already a 10% bigger core, and thats a 1600 shader core with bits disabled. It would seem a 6770 is going to be somewhere in the 1200-1400 shader region as standard, that will drop die size over a Cypress by another 10% at least, maybe 20% while probably maintaining very close to 5850 performance and likely better minimums and better performance in highly complex situations.
So the 460gtx 1gb is suffering already and barely profitable, AMD is bringing out a card thats going to be a further 20% smaller, which makes it even cheaper to produce. If it can offer 5850 performance, and cost only £170 and still make a profit, Nvidia will be having to sell 1gb 460gtx's at, £130 to maintain the same price/performance ratio of the 6770.
They are going to highest performance single core, they are going to lose profit on their only competitive part(the 460gtx) they don't have an ultra low end, with GT310/315 and their mobile versions filling in the ultra low end because they completely stupidly made the minimum core count 48, so its 3 times bigger than the 16 core old cards, which is what they need for their biggest volume sales.
So for the next year AMD will be selling 5430 and 6430 DX11 ultra small low end parts by the millions and Nvidia will be offering a dx10.1, slower part which is basically 2 years old at this point(because it was delayed by basically a year as they kept screwing up the shrink). Its a gt210 rebranded to gt310, and they can't rebrand it again because it doesn't fit the DX11 4xx series branding.
High end slower + costs a lot more + makes a loss to sell + uses more power.
Mid end, not profitable, costs a lot more, will make a loss to sell in volume it needs, uses more power, slower.
Low end, they forgot it and are using 2 year old design with dx10.1 tacked on.
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