Shrunken GeForce GTX 260 by Zotac

As long as nVidia has no graphics card to compete with the Radeon HD5800 series, it's up to the manufacturer's partners to keep the existing models interesting for consumers. We recently saw a new GTX 260 by Galaxy, which only uses a single-slot cooler. nVidia partner Zotac proves there are more possibilities: the company has re-designed the PCB, resulting in a much smaller card. Zotac also had to design a new cooler, which is kept dual-slot.

To reduce the PCB size, Zotac has positioned the GPU's 4-phase power design to the front of the card, next to the output-connectors. The rear of the card holds the remaining power regulators, as well as an eight-pin PCI-Express power connector, instead of the conventional twin 6-pin connectors. The GT200b chip, which looks even bigger on a small card like this, is surrounded by the NVIO controller and fourteen GDDR3 Hynix memory chips. The card is equipped with 896 MB memory and uses a 448-bits interface. The memory is specified at 0,8 ns, allowing for quite some overclocking potential. The GPU is clocked at 625 MHz, while the memory has an effective clock frequency of 2200 MHz.

The card uses an alternative dual-slot cooler which is in direct contact with all important heat-producing components. A copper base is located on the GPU's position, while the rest of the cooling block consists of aluminum. The plastic cover directs the airflow directly over the cooling profile, thus dissipating most of the heat via the rear. Zotac's new card has DVI, VGA and HDMI connectors and is (Triple) SLI compatible. It's still unclear what the card'll cost or when it'll become available. Image source: XT Review.

The compact Zotac GTX 260 uses a dualslot cooler

The GPU is surrounded by 14 Hynix GDDR3 chips

Most of the power design has been relocated to the front of the card

The cooler with a copper core around the GPU

Tags: ddr3 geforce gtx260 hdmi overclocking radeon sli

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