Zotac Presents the 'Fastest Air-Cooled' GTX 400 Cards

Though NVIDIA was very late in actually launching its DirectX 11-capable graphics cards, the same cannot be said about its partners. In fact, as soon as they were allowed to start experimenting with the design, graphics card makers started showing off and selling water-cooled models, as well as tweaked cards with special fansinks. Zotac has decided to finally join the fray with the GeForce GTX 470 and 480 AMP! edition.

The only disadvantage that the new video boards have is their size. Equipped with a Zalman VF3000 cooler, each takes up not one, not two, but three whole PCI slots. This means that it will be quite a challenge to set up multi-GPU SLI configurations, even on large motherboards. Nevertheless, the cooling benefit is real, and even permitted the developers to tweak the clocks and push performance even higher than the one NVIDIA provided.

The GTX 470 has a GPU clock speed of 656MHz instead of 607Mhz, a shader frequency of 1,312MHz and the 1,280MB of GDDR5 running at 3,402MHz. Only the number of CUDA cores (448) and the memory interface (320 bits) was left unchanged. As for the GTX 480, it also has the same number of cores and the memory interface of the stock model (480 and 384 bits), but the GF100 is set at 756MHz and the 1536MB GDDR5 at 3800MHz. Finally, the shaders work at 1512MHz.

"We wanted to transform the ZOTAC GeForce GTX 400 series graphics cards into something unique with our flagship AMP! Edition," said Carsten Berger, marketing director, ZOTAC International. "The result is the world's fastest GeForce GTX 400 series graphics cards that retain conventional air cooling.”

The GeForce GTX 470 and GTX 480 AMP! have their own mini HDMI and dual-DVI video outputs. As for pricing, the 470 has already become available for pre-order, for as little as 443.50 Euro.