14 DAY TRIAL // It appears that, between the second half of December and now, Gainward managed to use its time to finalize a certain video card and finally send it out to product vendors.
With the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 570 being launched in the later parts of 2010, the GPU maker's partners quickly started to reveal custom models.
Gainward, sure enough, did this very thing, only its particular version actually turned a few heads because of its less than ordinary cooler.
It is a fairly massive-looking solution, with six heatpipes that lead the heat form the copper base into the heatsink with 44 aluminum fins.
Said heat is then dispersed by not just one or two, but three PWM fans with a diameter of 80mm each.
The product is known as GeForce GTX 570 Phantom and has higher clock speeds than the stock controller.
The GF110 graphics processing unit, for one, works at 750 MHz, while the shader and 1,280 MB of GDDR5 memory have clocks of 1,500 MHz and 3,900 MHz, respectively.
For comparison, NVIDIA's original has speeds of 732 MHz, 1,464 MHz and 3,800 MHz, respectively.
What Gainward did preserve was the memory interface of 320 bits, 480 CUDA cores and a pair of PCI Express power connectors, one of them an 8-pin and one of the 6-pin variety (the TDP is of 225 Watts).
Finally, connectivity to monitors is achieved via dual-DVI, HDMI and DisplayPort connectors while the full list of graphics technologies is, naturally, supported.
In other words, besides DirectX 11, there is the CUDA technology, PhysX, 3D Vision Surround and 3-way SLI, the latter for multi-GPU configurations.
Those wishing to acquire the Gainward GeForce GTX 570 Phantom can go here, the price being of slightly under $350. A certain report even says that one might find it for sale at 333 Euro if one looks long and closely enough around the web.