(Insider Report) - Recent leak of a 7800GS card was covered up by saying these were engineering samples for internal circulation. Now think about this for just one second. Does it make sense for a company to go around making redundant products just for the heck of it? Just to help developers test on it? Developers won’t want to test on anything that will never see the light of the day.

Our own feeling is that 7800GS will indeed come out as a card (recent reports elsewhere not withstanding) and we have a strong suspicion that the card will be AGP compliant. Though PCIe has been fairly successful thus far, NVIDIA still has a significant AGP market to cover, which it needs to do to justify as much profits as possible.

When NVIDIA launches a possible update to the G70 or the 7800GTX 512MB series in Feb ’06, that’s exactly when we suspect NVIDIA to come out with an AGP version of the 7800GS. With that said, we don’t believe 7800GS will ever come out in PCI Express standard.