14 DAY TRIAL // It appears that the as yet unannounced mainstream NVIDIA video card that Galaxy already said it would customize has found itself modeled in the image of yet another hardware maker, Zotac to be exact.
Consumers will no doubt be aware of the fact that NVIDIA is working on a dual-GPU video card that will challenge AMD's new Radeon HD 6990.
What they might not be as aware of is that another NVIDIA card, called GeForce GTX 550 Ti, is on its way as well.
Galaxy has already been revealed to be working on an advanced version with higher than usual clock frequencies, and it seems it is not the only one with such designs.
Specifically, Zotac is said to be working on a similar board, one bearing the name of GeForce GTX 550 Ti AMP! Edition.
The name alone is enough to hint at the existence of factory overclocking and, sure enough, the GF116 GPU (graphics processing unit) is 100 MHz faster than the normal one.
In other words, instead of 900 MHz, the clock speed of the main chip is 1,000 MHz, a performance complemented by the 192 CUDA cores.
These shaders, although normally programmed to run at 1,800 MHz, are clocked at 2,000 MHz.
Of course, this mainstream-level video controller wouldn't be what it is without a suitable amount of memory, so Zotac stuck to the 1 GB of GDDR5 VRAM that NVIDIA intended.
This memory has a clock frequency of 4,400 MHz, which is 300 MHz over the 4,100 MHz that the stock card comes with.
All the above are cooled by a dual-slot, single-fan cooler and meant to sell for the price of $155. That price will also get users 2-way SLI support, plus multiple connectors (dual-DVI, HDMI and DisplayPort), for compatibility with all sorts (mostly) of monitors and HDTVs.