FOR THOSE OF you that are looking for something a bit exotic – in terms of your next graphics card upgrade – then Zotac’s dual GeForce GTX 460 card might be what you’ve been waiting for. This dual GF104 card isn’t Nvidia’s rumoured GTX 490, by any means, but this is all a custom design by Zotac.
Pictures of the card have been posted over at Expreview along with some basic details. The pictures are of a bare board and there’s no hint to as to what the cooling will look like. However, taking the double stacked DVI ports into consideration, this card will have at least a dual slot cooler. The card not only has four DVI ports, but Zotac has also managed to squeeze in a single mini HDMI port. Despite being a dual GPU card, it still has an SLI connector, so potentially you could run a pair of these cards in SLI.
Each GPU has been paired up with 1GB of 0.5ns Samsung GDDR5 memory, each set with its own power regulation circuitry. Each GPU has a 3+1 phase power regulation setup, and Zotac is using rear mounted Prodalizers on this card, just as you’ll find on higher-end GTX 470 and 480 cards. The card has a pair of eight pin power connectors, something that suggests that this is one power hungry card. There is, of course, a NF200 chip located towards the bottom of the card which enables both of the GPU’s to work in SLI on the same PCB.
It’s not certain that this card will ever make it into retail, but it’s always interesting to see what the graphics card manufacturers can come up with. Frankencards, like this one, have something of an appeal, but sadly more often than not, they never actually enter the retail market. We’ve seen a few custom dual GPU cards hit retail in the past, and hopefully this will be one of those cards. We’re fairly certain that there will be a demand for a card like this, albeit not a huge demand.S|A
Lars-Göran Nilsson
Latest posts by Lars-Göran Nilsson (see all)
- AMD and Nvidia set to take on LucidLogix Virtu - Apr 7, 2011
- Notebooks and hard drives to increase in price - Apr 6, 2011
- Motherboard makers craving affordable USB 3.0 solutions - Apr 6, 2011
- IEEE approves the IEEE 802.16m standard - Apr 1, 2011
- LucidLogix scores Intel as first Virtu customer - Apr 1, 2011