Factory overclocked graphics card

Sep 15, 2008 12:30 GMT  ·  By

Earlier today, we informed you about a new GeForce graphics card that NVIDIA was expected to release in order to improve the performance of its current GTX 260 card. Based on the same 65m process technology as the company's first GTX 260, the newcomer should deliver 5% to 10% more graphics performance, which would become possible because of the extra 24 Stream processors built in the upgraded GTX 260. Despite no official release from NVIDIA yet, one of its channel partners, Zotac, appears to have already finished its card, which comes in an “AMP” version.

 

The new Zotac card GeForce GTX 260 based on the upgraded GPU will be available in an “AMP! 2” model, which means that it will come with an factory overclocked graphics core, thus delivering a plus of performance over the reference GeForce GTX 260 cards with upgraded GPU. Pictures of the card and specifications have been leaked on the donanimhaber forum and, from the looks of it, the new card is similar in design with the previous GTX 260, featuring the same reference cooling solution.

 

By taking a look at the tech sheet, we learn that the card has been designed to deliver an impressive 650MHz core speed (compared to the 576MHz of the reference model), while the 896MB of GDDR3 memory have been clocked to 1998MHz, which is 200MHz slower than the previous GTX 260 AMP! edition. The GT200's 216 stream processors have been clocked to 1400MHz, while the reference model will only be able to provide a speed of 1242MHz.

 

Aside from that, the new card should offer the same PCI-Express 2.0 interface and triple-SLI support as the first GTX 260 model. Unfortunately, there's no word on the official release date or on when it is due to arrive in stores. However, the fact that details on it have already been leaked on the Internet could tell us that we might just see it available for purchase by the end of this month.