I saw this, too, and think its purpose is just to admit, in its own inimitable fashion, that Inquirer really doesn't know what it's talking about when it makes such colorful noises about nV40...
Notice that this time there's no reiteration of any "16-pixel-pipeline" claim, and that their new "source" for nV40 info is telling them this "very large" gpu is 175M transistors, instead of the 205-210M transistors their last "source" told them was required by the "16 pixel pipelines" of the other nV40.
Doesn't it seem odd that they stated they believed that "what they saw before" was ~210M transistors, and yet it doesn't seem incongruent to them that the current "175M transistor" nV40 in this case is "in comparison to what we have seen before, quite large"....? Granted that what they "saw before" might not have been an nV40 at all, but then, why say that it was if it wasn't? Heh...
You'd think that they'd expect this gpu, with fewer transistors, would be physically smaller than what they "saw before," instead of quite a bit larger.
From the way the account is written, it seems apparent the author didn't actually put the card in a system or run it, or even observe it being run inside someone else's system, so it seems at least possible that what the Inquirer was shown might have been a mechanical mockup--totally non functional--or else maybe an entirely different card altogether--maybe just a different mockup of a different 3d card--and somebody is just having fun pushing the Inquirer's buttons.
It also seems odd to me that although they claimed to have "removed the heatsink" and that although the gpu exposed was "quite large," they were unable to decipher any tell-tale silk-screen printing on the gpu which they might have recorded for everyone's enlightenment. That would have been kind of interesting, I think. So maybe if they didn't see it, it was because whatever had been printed on the gpu had been removed...? (Not hard to do.) It seems from their "we could see that a small formed surrounding was employed to assist leveling of the heatsink" remark that they certainly studied the gpu area long enough to see any printing that might have been present. Just guessing, but it would appear they might have thought that the absence of printing on the gpu was "normal" in the case of prototype cards, but I've seen dummy mockups with silk-screen identifiers printed on the chips.
Also, the lack of a heatsink for the ram chips on the flip side of the PCB would tend to indicate a mockup, very possibly. Speaking of the GDDR3 ram modules, it, again, seems odd that no effort was made to record the ram-chip identifiers, which could have been taken from ram on the rear of the pcb even if not from the front after heatsink removal. This remark seemed cryptic: "However these were not from Micron, which at that time seemed to be both ATi and Nvidia’s GDDR3 development partner. Instead, Samsung seems to be the preferred supplier of the 256MB we saw installed." It tends to make me think they weren't sure that it was GDDR3 at all, as they expected GDDR3 to come from Micron. Odd, to me, that they could bother getting the brand name from the ram chips, but not the numbered identifiers, so that their assumptions might have been verified. The fact that there was, they say, 256mbs onboard the card certainly doesn't prove it was GDDR3.
When I saw this, "The primary shocker was that the board requires two large 4-pin power connectors as opposed to the single power connector on current high-end products," I got a very strong mental image of Ricardo Montalban singing, "VO-lar-E', yo-yo-yo-yo!" and making obscene comments about "Reech Cor-een-thian Leathers-s-s-s-s-sssss"....
But then, that wouldn't jive with the "in comparison to what we have seen before, quite large" 175M transistor gpu, which was apparently much larger than what they saw earlier and believed to be a ~210M transistor nV40 gpu with 16 pixel pipelines, would it?....
And, to go on, I found it odd that they'd think nVidia might take an nV40, mount it on a PCIe pcb, and call it "nV45," assuming they didn't mean that nVidia was going to wait until nV45 before it would produce a native PCIe 3d reference design...
Assuming that Inquirer meant that at some point nVidia plans to market a native PCIe reference design for a 3d accelerator, I can only assume they meant to say a "PCIe to AGP x8 bridge chip," instead of what they said, which was "Whether that has an AGP to PCI Express bridge chip remains to be seen."
But that's one of the joys of Inquirer "scoops," isn't it? They are always just so crystal clear...