Korean cooling specialist Zalman known primarily for its cooling solutions and cases has now decided to enter into the graphics card business as an AMD add-in board (AIB) partner and already announced a few mainstream solutions based on Radeon HD designs.
While definitely surprising,
Zalman’s move actually makes a lot of sense as the company’s coolers were already used by many AIBs for their graphics cards.
This greatly simplified Zalman’s entrance into the market as it can outsource its printed circuit boards (PCBs) from other companies such as PC Partner, Hightech Information Systems, or TUL and then add its cooling solutions on top of these.
As
Overclockers.ua has managed to find out, Zalman’s initial graphics card lineup will be comprised of three solutions.
Two of these solutions are based on AMD’s Barts core used for the Radeon HD 6870 and Radeon HD 6850, while the third is a Radeon HD 6770 graphics card built using AMD’s rebranded Juniper XT GPU that made its debut in the HD 5770.
Despite the custom coolers added by Zalman, all three solutions are using
AMD’s reference clocks for both the GPU and the memory, so these should perform on par with other similar stock-clocked solutions.
No info is available at this time regarding the availability of these video cards, but the source did manage to uncover the prices of the three Zalman creations.
The cheapest of the three graphics cards, the Radeon HD 6770 is priced at $124 (92.7 EUR), while the
Radeon HD 6850 and HD 6870 will retail for $168 and $190, respectively (125.6 and 142 EUR).
It remains to be seen how well Zalman will fare in the competitive graphics card market, but the company sure has the right background for making a good impression.
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