Thursday, April 21, 2011

Zotac Prepares GTX 580 Extreme Edition Graphics Card with 16+2 Phase Power


Zotac is getting ready to launch yet another heavily customized GTX 580 graphics card that will feature a non-standard PCB with a 16+2 phase power design as well as an in-house developed cooling system.

Its new creation will be called the GTX 580 Extreme Edition and one of its most distinctive features is the in-house developed three-slot cooler that features six thick copper heatpipes from drawing the heat away from the GF110 core.


According to the company, this can dissipate between 250W and 300W of heat, which means that Zotac's card should be cooler than Nvidia's reference design.

Ouside of the GPU, Zotac also thought about the memory chips and VRMs and installed an aluminum heatspreader that covers most of the printed circuit board (PCB).


Speaking of which, this now features a taller design to accommodate the 16+2 phase PWM (16 phases for the GF110 core and two for the memory chips) that is able to deliver up to 500W of power to the GPU.

In addition to the increased phase count, Zotac has also installed tantalum filter capacitors to minimize the card's ripple and noise as well as a 3V 1000uF FPCAP decoupling capacitor to quickly respond to changing current demands.


The 12 memory chips installed on the Zotac GTX 580 Extreme Edition, that total 1.5GB of video buffer, are manufactured by Samsung and work at a default 850MHz (3400MHz data rate), although they are 0.4ns parts.

Sadly, no details regarding the frequency of the GPU are available at this time, but all the changes made by Zotac to the standard GTX 580 should offer a hefty overclocking headroom.

As it's usually the case with high-end graphics cards, Zotac's creation features a complete list of output interfaces, including a pair of dual-link DVI ports, an HDMI connector and a full size DisplayPort output.

The Zotac GTX 580 Extreme Edition hasn't yet received a firm shipping date or price. (via Expreview)


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