Leaker braves Nvidia's ire with images of GTX 10 series cooling shrouds

We may not yet know exactly when Nvidia is planning to drop its next-generation Pascal GPUs on us, but it seems we’re getting much closer to that date. Some leaked images have appeared which seem to show cooling shrouds with debossed GTX 1070 and GTX 1080 iconography on them.

Nvidia has been quite quiet about its upcoming range of Pascal cards, though they are expected to bear the 10XX series moniker. As it stands though, while VideoCardz has done a pretty strong analysis of the images to confirm their authenticity, we can’t guarantee them for now — so take them with a pinch of salt.

With that warning in mind, however, we can speculate about what these shrouds might mean. They don’t appear to line up with cooling shrouds from the current 900 series cards, which would suggest an overall new design — something that may be warranted if Nvidia does indeed use high bandwidth memory (HBM) 2.0 in the new cards as it is rumored to be doing.

Related: Chinese tech website details Nvidia’s rumored GTX 1080 GPU

They don’t seem particularly long either, which would also play into the idea of the shrinking GPU — something made possible with HBM memory, as we saw with some of AMD’s latest R9 releases. Countering that idea, however, is a recent rumor that the GTX 1080 will actually come fitted with GDDR5X memory, which is not the same sort of technology at all.

Fortunately we don’t have long to wait to find out if these photos are real or not and what such a cooling shroud design might mean, as Nvidia is expected to finally unveil the Pascal cards at this year’s GPU Technology Conference, set to take place between April 4 and 7.

What do you think of these images? Fake or not? And if not, what do you think they might mean for the next series of graphics cards from Nvidia?