Card takes up three expansion slots

May 5, 2010 08:49 GMT  ·  By

When NVIDIA finally made the official introduction of its GeForce GTX 470 and GTX 480 graphics adapters, it was revealed that, for all their assets and extreme performance capabilities, the adapters had two main drawbacks: their high power consumption and equally high operational temperatures. This meant that, while the cards themselves didn't really have any problem in their base form, they didn't exactly have that high an overclocking potential either. Fortunately, where there's a will, there's a way, and Zotac claims to have found it with the GTX 480 Amp! Edition.

Apparently, at times, the only way to solve a “problem” is to make it bigger. This seems to be the approach that Zotac took when it strapped a huge, three-slot Zalman cooler onto the video card. Known as the Zalman VF3000 GPU cooler, the mechanism makes the entire beast large enough to require not just one or two, but three expansion slots. In return for being so massive, the graphics controller will provide its owners with higher clocks than the reference adapter.

Consumers likely know that the GPU, shader and memory frequencies of the stock model are of 700MHz, 1,401MHz and 924 (3,700)MHz. Zalman's new offspring is faster, with the graphics processing unit clocked at 750MHz, the shaders at 1,512MHz and the memory at 900MHz (3,800MHz). The rest of the feature set is unchanged. There is the obvious DirectX 11 support, 1,536MB of GDDR5 VRAM, a 384-bit interface and 480 CUDA cores.

Unfortunately, the reports don't offer details on how much lower this three-slot cooler can push the temperatures, nor is there any information on availability and pricing. Still, this product shouldn't take long to start selling, which means that these final bits of information should become known soon enough. End-users shouldn't make any illusions, however, considering that Zalman's cooling modules make no compromises when it comes to performance and, thus, they aren't known for being cheap.