Thursday, January 31st 2013
ZOTAC GeForce GTX 660 Thunderbolt Graphics Card Pictured
As the Lunar New Year shopping season heats up in the Greater China Region, ZOTAC launched yet another innovative performance-segment graphics card, the GeForce GTX 660 Thunderbolt Edition, which has nothing to do with the Thunderbolt interface (sorry to get your hopes up). What this card does bring to the table, are a high-grade non-reference design PCB, and an innovative new cooling solution.
The cooler may look like yet another aluminum fin stack ventilated by two fans, but it's in fact a chunky monolithic aluminum heatsink, with heat-transfer bolstered by three copper heat pipes. It's hence a hybrid between heatsinks and fin-stacks. Heatsinks give you the convenience of easier cleaning as spacing between their ridges are greater, and are generally more rigid. In the pictures below ZOTAC demonstrates how its hybrid heatsink is better than fin-stacks.
To make matters better, the cooler features what ZOTAC calls "EClean." Simply put, EClean is a mechanism with which you can easily detach the cooler shroud on which the fans are mounted, by pressing a retention notch, and sliding out the shroud that's suspended on rails, on the main heatsink. Removing the shroud lets you clean the heatsink.
Innovations aside, the GeForce GTX 660 Thunderbolt Edition from ZOTAC sticks to NVIDIA reference clock speeds of 980 MHz core, 1033 MHz GPU Boost, and 6.00 GHz memory, leaving headroom for users to overclock on their own. It features 2 GB of GDDR5 memory across a 192-bit wide memory interface. Based on the 28 nm GK106 silicon, the GeForce GTX 660 packs 960 CUDA cores. The card draws power from a single 6-pin power connector, display outputs include two DVI and one each of HDMI and DipsplayPort. ZOTAC did not release pricing information, but we know for sure that this one (like most other innovative graphics card designs from ZOTAC) is reserved for Chinese buyers.
Source:
Expreview
The cooler may look like yet another aluminum fin stack ventilated by two fans, but it's in fact a chunky monolithic aluminum heatsink, with heat-transfer bolstered by three copper heat pipes. It's hence a hybrid between heatsinks and fin-stacks. Heatsinks give you the convenience of easier cleaning as spacing between their ridges are greater, and are generally more rigid. In the pictures below ZOTAC demonstrates how its hybrid heatsink is better than fin-stacks.
26 Comments on ZOTAC GeForce GTX 660 Thunderbolt Graphics Card Pictured
I like how the ezclean thing.
Btarunr, you've been fooling me too much lately. :respect:
the 560 OEM can be overclocked to 925, its base memory clock is 802.. just a clock of 803 would beat the ti's 1002
the 560 OEM is better than 560 ti clock for clock by far
www.techpowerup.com/gpudb/287/NVIDIA_GeForce_GTX_560.html
www.techpowerup.com/gpudb/891/NVIDIA_GeForce_GTX_560_OEM_(PCIe_2.0_x16).html
So for it not being a GTX, it sure looks like a GTX by your database
A Thunderbolt enabled card would really jump up the price as I believe it will take not only a TB controller but a PCIe switch as well. Could end up adding $60 or more to the price. Not saying we won't ever see one, but it'll most likely be an expensive specialty card.
On a separate but related note, any manufacturer going to put out a 1.5GB 660/660 TI? Or is this something that nVidia doesn't allow?