Sean Hollister from Engadget is reporting that rumors that the new Fermi-based graphics card has got a new GF106 chip under its cover cannot be confirmed. It does seem likely though that shipping samples from ASUS, EVGA, Gigabyte, and Palit are showing just 192 CUDA cores, as well as a narrower 128-bit memory interface.

The GTS 450 can still be a more than capable gamer card, as the graphics and shader chips are running a clock time of almost 800MHz and 1.6GHz. Also they have only been paired with a full 1GB of GDDR5 memory, and the same 3.6Hz effective rate.

As they are going to cost $130 each, people who are really after graphics capability will likely spend more to have those extra cores.