14 DAY TRIAL // Zotac, one of NVIDIA's leading add-in board partners, is expected to unveil a new GeForce graphics cards based on the latter's highest-performance single-GPU solution, the GTX 285. However, unlike the graphics cards released by other NVIDIA partners, the new GeForce GTX 285 designed by Zotac will not employ a standard NVIDIA board design. According to a recent article on Expreview, the new Zotac GeForce graphics card will come out as the first non-reference GTX 285 graphics card on the market.
The Santa Clara, California-based chip maker has already allowed its partners to design non-reference GeForce GTX 260 graphics cards, and it appears that it now allows them to also manufacture non-reference editions of the highest-performance single-GPU graphics card on the market, the 55nm GeForce GTX 285. According to Expreview, the first graphics card maker to release such a card is Zotac, as pictures of said product have already surfaced on the Internet.
As far as specifications go, Zotac's non-reference GTX 285 has been designed with a core speed of 648MHz, while the memory and Shader clocks have been set to 2484MHz and 1476MHz. As you can see, there's no difference there, as these numbers are identical to the ones featured on NVIDIA's reference design. However, the Zotac card will provide a 6+2 phase power supply design and a detached power supply for memory and core, which has been moved near the NVIO chip, according to Expreview.
The card also supports 2-way and 3-way SLI, as well as other NVIDIA technologies, such as PhysX or CUDA. Unfortunately, for the time being we are left with just pictures of a stripped-down version of Zotac's non-reference GeForce GTX 285, as details on cooling system, pricing or availability, are yet to emerge.