According to sources cited by DigiTimes, Nvidia's upcoming Fermi launch will be limited to select graphics card makers. Second-tier manufacturers won't start shipping GeForce GTX 470 and 480 cards until April, as most have yet to receive complete reference board designs. Nvidia will reportedly give supply priority to first-tier makers, or those that only produce Nvidia cards.

Both the GTX 470 and 480 have already appeared on some e-tail sites from manufacturers like XFX and PNY, so they are presumably among those that will have stock available early on. DigiTimes spoke with PNY, who stressed that it is not yet offering pre-orders on Fermi cards, so the listings were probably the result of miscommunication.

DigiTimes also noted that some analysts don't expect a price war between Nvidia and AMD until after May. The sites that accidentally jumped the gun listed the GTX 470 and 480 at $499.99 and $679.99, and AMD only has one card in that territory: the dual-GPU Radeon HD 5970, which is fetching about $650.