Zotac 55nm GeForce GTX 260 images surface

nVidia will launch a 55nm version of its GTX 260 graphics card soon. After earlier image claims of the 3D-chip, Expreview has now released photos of the 55nm GTX 260 card by Zotac. Based on the new reference P654 PCB, Zotac seems to have only altered the color settings, opting for a blue PCB-design. Zotac's GTX 260² will use the 55nm GT200b chip and 216 shader units. 

The PCB design uses 10 layers, unlike to the original 14-layer design. The power provision has also undergone some improvements, the GPU is powered by a 4-phase and the memory with a 2-phase provision.

The copper cooling is specially designed by Cooler Master and features four copper heatsinks and an 80 mm temperature-controlled fan. The block is designed to cool not only the 3D-chip, but also the memory and power modules.  The new card will have 896 MB of GDDR3 memory and a 448-bit memory interface. The standard clock frequencies of the GPU and memory are also unaltered, they feature respective clockspeeds of 575 MHz and 2000 MHz, having a memory bandwidth of 112 GByte/s. This means that the performance of the new card will not differ too much from the original GTX 260-216 core. The biggest advantage will be the lower power consumption and enhanced overclocking options. Zotac's new card is expected to be released around January 2009. 

image source: Expreview.