Zalman to Enter Graphics Card Market With AMD GPUs

Overclockers.ua has leaked slides which strongly suggest that Zalman will soon be entering the graphics card market. Zalman is mostly known for their coolers and their CPU coolers are one of the most popular ones at NewEgg; they also sell power supplies and SSDs. At least initially, Zalman will be AMD's partner. The slides have only AMD 6870, 6850 and 6770 listed, but it's possible that we will see more models when this becomes official. Here is a table of the GPUs.

Specifications of Zalman's Graphics Card Lineup
Model	HD6870-H	HD6850-H	HD6770-H
GPU	AMD 6870	AMD 6850	AMD 6770
Stream Processors	1120	960	800
Texture Units	56	48	40
ROPs	32	32	16
Core Clock	900MHz	775MHz	850MHz
Effective Memory Clock	4200MHz	4000MHz	4800MHz
Memory (GDDR5)	1GB	1GB	1GB
Memory Bus Width	256-bit	256-bit	128-bit
Price	$190	$168	$124

The cards are all running at stock frequencies. Zalman is well known for their cooling solutions, and we expected their GPUs to have a beefier cooler and possibly be overclocked as well. To be honest, the cards look vapid. The cooler design is very reference and there are plenty of cards with similar designs, for example the HIS 6850 Fan. That is not to say the cooling system is bad, it's just nothing special.

There are already plenty of AMD board partners so succeeding requires you to be different, usually either in price or cooling performance. Given the prices, Zalman isn't competing in that category, which leaves them with cooling performance. Zalman definitely has the experience in cooling systems, including GPU coolers, and hopefully we will see some products that are more innovative from them in the future.

Shipments are set to start next Tuesday, December 13th.