ZOTAC IS A COMPANY that makes its own rules when it comes to making products that no-one else have really thought about. It now looks like the company is about to launch a custom dual GPU GTS250 card which looks like no other dual GPU card we’ve ever seen before.
Expreview has gotten their hands on some exclusive pictures of the new card and it’s hard not to be surprised at how different this looks compared to other attempts at making similar products. Galaxy was working on a dual GPU GTS250 sometime ago, but as far as we’re aware, that card never entered retail. Zotac’s design is actually quite clever, as the company simply moved the power regulation circuitry to the top of the card on a small piece of PCB that sticks up above the rest of the card.
This makes it much easier to cool the GPUs, NF200 PCI Express bridge and the memory chips, as there are virtually no other components on the PCB. This makes for a very clean looking layout, if somewhat odd. The power regulation part of the PCB is home to what appears to be a seven phase design, with three for each GPU and one for the NF200. There’s a separate two phase power regulation for the memory at the lower front corner of the card, but this uses low profile components that won’t interfere with the heatsink.
Each GPU has 512MB of GDDR3 memory at its disposal made up out of eight chips on a 256-bit bus, the same as on any other GTS250 card. The twin fan cooler doesn’t look overly impressive, but the fans appear to have PWM control, so hopefully it should be fairly quiet in use. We’re not overly impressed with Zotac’s selection of ports around the back though, as the card has one dual-link DVI port, an HDMI port and a D-sub connector, of which we’d like to have seen the D-sub connector replaced by something a bit more modern. Expreview is claiming that the card should be available soon “with a reasonable price” although we have no idea if Zotac is planning on selling this card worldwide or if it’s been designed for limited markets.S|A
Lars-Göran Nilsson
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