Nvidia is a master of marketing, so when they “quietly” launched the GeForce GT 610, 620, and 630 into the retail channel late last week, we knew something was up. It turns out of the three new cards, none of these are actually based on the most recently released Kepler architecture behind the GTX 670, 680, and 690, and are in reality based on the last generation designs.  We knew Nvidia was already rebranding Fermi parts for use in OEM laptops and desktops, however it looks like the practice will again carry forward to the aftermarket parts as well. 

When the GTX 500 series hit the market they were strong performers, but ran both hot and loud. The Kepler architecture on the other hand didn’t just give Nvidia’s 600 series a performance advantage, they are extremely competitive when it comes to power draw. Thanks to incredible advances in power efficiency however, it may finally be possible to offer single slot design for even the highest end GPU’s. Galaxy is looking to be the first AIB vendor to offer such a solution, and a series of leaked photos shows off what they have in mind. 

If you're still gaming on a Radeon HD-4000 series graphics card (or older) your GPU isn’t about to self-destruct, but it will fall out of mainstream support in the very near future. AMD announced today that Catalyst 12.6 will mark the end of the road for anything prior to the HD-5000 series, or to put it simply, anything that isn’t DirectX-11 compliant.