Well, my guess was close -- when the supposed specifications turned up for the gaming-beast card from NVIDIA, the 9900 GTX (which is apparently coming in less than a month), a price around $450 seemed reasonable. It looks like it will initially be retailing for $499, according to website Fudzilla.

A trio of pictures of the 9900 GTX's cooler showed up on Chinese tech site, PCOnline.

Hmm..this cooler looks familiar. It looks more-than-a-bit similar to the cooler on the 9800 GTX. But this makes sense -- that 9800 GTX cooler is a capable one, so there would be no need for NVIDIA to scrap all the plans for it and built a entirely new cooler for the 9900 GTX 'just because.'

The perhaps-dual core GPU 9900 GTX will have some serious competition in ATI's RV770 -- which will probably come out labeled as a HD 4850 and HD 4870 -- if all the rumored specs are to be believed. The HD 4870 will be the first card with GDDR5 memory, and this gigabyte of memory will be tied to a 512-bit bus, and a whole flock of steam processors (480 to be more precise). Further rumors point to the card being available in the last week of June, but probably not found in stores until the first or second week of July.

Either way, the 9900 GTX going up against the HD 4870 is shaping up to be one of the best video card battles seen in a long time, if all the leaked and rumored specifications are to be believed.

Furthermore, it appears that the HD4870 will be followed up fairly quickly with a HD4870X2 dual-GPU card, so I would also expect NVIDIA to follow suit (perhaps preemptively) with a tweaking of the 9800 GX2: perhaps they'll increase the clocks a bit, and cut the price a little. I would not expect them to release a 9900GX2 card very soon, as the 9800GX2 only came out recently and has not had much time on the shelves.