NVIDIA's move to rebrand the GeForce 9800 GTX+ to GeForce GTS 250 was meant to be followed with a similar rebranding for the GeForce 9800 GT, to GeForce GTS 240. The company even prepared a reference PCB design for the accelerator. Alas, the move wasn't popular NVIDIA's partners, who forced it shelve the plans.

Apparently NVIDIA wants to continue development of the GeForce GTS 240, at least for its OEM customers, if not AIC partners that cater to the retail consumer segment. The GeForce GTS 240 reference design accelerator is in accordance with the schematics that surfaced back in February, and maintains a single-slot design overall. Under the hood is the 55 nm G92b graphics processor with 112 shader processors, a 256-bit GDDR3 memory interface, 1 GB of memory, and reference clock speeds that match that of GeForce 9800 GT OC: 675/1620/1100 (core/shader/memory). The card supports 2-way SLI, and should be priced in the sub $130 space.

Following the news we covered just last month of NVIDIA's plans to rename the 9800 GT to GTS 240, despite the fact the 9800 GT was little more than a renamed 8800 GT, it seems the GPU board partners have managed to convince NVIDIA not to follow through with this name change. There had been much controversy over NVIDIA's renaming scheme even here on our forums, but in a confidential email seen by DailyTech, NVIDIA has cancelled plans to rename the chip yet again. Instead there will now be three versions of the 9800 GT, one of which includes the feature updates due to be present in the GTS 240. There will be the green edition, which we had already heard news of some time ago, which has no need for external power connectors, there will be the standard version, and then an OC version, which although details are not yet confirmed, one would imagine the card would be clocked at the GTS 240 expected speeds of 675/1688/2200 MHz.