14 DAY TRIAL // Building a custom designed card is the only thing that can set a video card manufacturer apart from the others.
Having something special, no matter if it’s a 50 cent exhaust bracket that gets more hot air outside the card or a 10 cent plastic fan holder that allows you to turn the fan some millimeters towards one side or the other, it is going to help the company earn ten to twenty times the value of their added cost.
However, the most important success of the team, if they manage to get the sale, is to make you pick their card and not the one sitting next to it on the shelf.
Therefore, some manufacturers will heavily invest in their card design to make something really special no matter if it brings them some extra profit or not.
Generally, a successful sale for one company means costs are paid for and profits, big or small, are made while the competing company’s budget suffers.
The guys at techpowerup managed to get some pictures of a very nice custom design from Palit and what Palit’s GTX 680 Jetstream has to offer is a custom PCB with 6-phase VRM, using high-quality chokes and DrMOS components in the power filtering area of the card, along with a custom cooling system.
It draws current from a double 6 + 8 pin PCIe connector and it’s being cooled by three fans. The one in the middle is 90 mm in diameter while the others are 80 mm fans.
The factory overclock is 1085 MHz from the reference 1058 MHz Core clock speed and 1575 MHz for the memory from the default 1052 Mhz. That’s an effective speed of 6300 MHz for the GDDR5 chips.
Palit touts 8 degrees Celsius lower temperatures than the reference Nvidia developed design and all these customizations are likely to raise the price of the video card to around 530 US dollars, that is around 399 Euro for the European buyers.
