Zotac's Passively Cooled GTS 450 Zone Edition Makes Appearance

The high power consumption of modern mid-range GPUs has kept graphics card makers from releasing too many passively cooled solutions built on these cores, but Zotac has found a way to surpass these issues with its recently introduced GeForce GTS 450 Zone Edition.

While the GTS 450 is no longer what we would call a cutting edge GPU this is still able to deliver some decent frame rates at lower resolutions in most of today's games as long as the image quality settings aren't turned all they way to the top.

In Zotac's latest creation, the Nvidia graphics core is cooled by a large aluminum heatsink which draws the heat from the GPU via three copper heatpipes.

This takes two PCI slots inside the system case and even protrudes beyond the margins of the printed circuit board.

Speaking of which, Zotac has redesigned the PCB to make it shorter and to decrease the power consumption of its graphics card, which can now function without requiring any additional power outside of the 75W provided by the PCI Express slot.

In order to achieve this feat, Zotac had to lower the operating frequencies of the GTS 450 Zone Edition as the GPU is now clocked at 600MHz, while the 1GB of DDR3 memory works at 667MHz (1334MHz data rate).

In comparison, the standard version of the GTS 450 comes with a 783MHz core clock and with 1GB of GDDR5 memory that is running at 902MHz (3.608GHz data rate).

“Zotac listens to the demands of silent computing users and their needs for more graphics power, which is why we created the GeForce GTS 450 Zone Edition,” said Carsten Berger, marketing director, Zotac International.

“With the Zotac GeForce GTS 450 Zone Edition we struck the perfect balance of 3D performance and energy-efficiency to eliminate the cooling fan, as well as the external power connector,” concluded the company's rep.

Zotac hasn't provide us with any details regarding the price or the release date of its passively cooled GeForce GTS 450 Zone Edition graphics card.