Palit Launches GTX 400, Prepares Custom-Cooled Versions

When NVIDIA finally released the GeForce GTX 470 and GTX 480 graphics cards, a couple of days ago, end-users, especially enthusiasts, were most likely hoping to see some overclocked versions form the GPU maker's partners. Unfortunately, all the cards, with a few exceptions, turned out to have reference specs. Now, Palit has joined the bandwagon and released its own pair of graphics adapters that are just as reference-clocked as all the others.

The only feature that makes Palit's adapters unique among its partners' products is the fact that it is entirely identical to the original NVIDIA devices. EVGA, MSI, Gigabyte and the others added one or two colorful stickers to make their cards stand out, at least a little, which, ironically, makes Palit's card stand out through its commonness. Nevertheless, the company seems to have something else up its sleeve, namely custom-cooled versions of both the GTX 470 and GTX 480.

So far, EVGA is the only to have gone that extra mile and offered multiple cooling options on the adapters, including a pair of water-cooled models. Palit might be the second to customize the graphics controllers, a possibility suggested by some leaked pictures of the cards equipped with dual-slot coolers with two fans.

The extra airflow will allow the adapters to stay cooler, which would be a welcome development considering Fermi's high operating temperature. Unfortunately for performance hopefuls, there seems to be no intention of factory overclocking, which means these custom-cooled models will also have reference specifications.

The GTX 470 has 448 CUDA cores, a 320-bit interface, a GPU clock of 607MHz, 1280MB GDDR5 memory at 3348MHz and a shader clock of 1215MHz. The GTX 480, on the other hand, will boast GPU/shader/memory clocks of 700/1,401/3,696 MHz, a memory interface of 384 bits and 480 CUDA cores. The products support DirectX 11, three-way SLI, CUDA and 3D Vision Surround.

The stock-cooled GTX 400 will start shipping on April 12. There is no clear launch date for the custom-cooled versions.