Zotac is one of the latest graphics card maker to enter the market. In fact, if you drop by their website, you'll see that it has just started up and still under construction. In any case, at this stage, Zotac is making purely NVIDIA GPU based graphics cards. From market industry talks, it seems that unlike ATI/AMD AIB partner policy, whereby price protection is pretty tightly enforced, NVIDIA AIC partners do not seem to display such a strong enforcement in this area. Thus, competition seems to be much stiffer between these card makers, which is why we see so many different solutions, which is a good thing for consumers. Zotac is actually a new sister company formed out of PC Partner. - VR-Zone

Zotac GeForce 8800 GTS 320MB PCI Express Review

The first Zotac card we have ever lay hands on is actually the pretty recently launched GeForce 8800 GTS 320MB. The cheapest model of video cards supporting DirectX 10 available in the market at this time. A liquid metal figure stares out from the box at you with glowing eyes. Mainly a very nice looking box, but as most of the manufacturers coming with a reference design based GeForce 8800 GTS supporting 320MB memory. No games attached unfortunately. This gives a clear indication this card is aimed at the price conscious consumer who does not want to pay extra for anything unnecessary.

Looking at the Zotac GeForce 8800 GTS, it comes clocked at higher clock speeds than set by NVIDIA as the reference. The core comes clocked at 567MHz, but featuring the shader clock at 1188MHz, which is in fact a default shader clock for the GTS accelerator. Next to that Zotac has increase the memory clock as well which give 1800MHz, and should give some boost to the performance. So although it is a reference design, it doesn't follow it to the full extend. With these slightly increased clock settings you will attain better performance in the end.

Overclocking? Simple, we would just go into nTune and pull up the fan speed. Now that you have improved cooling with just a drag of a slider. Install and run RivaTuner, and just pull up core clock and memory clock. We found that 650MHz core and 2020MHz memory should be relatively easy to achieve, just within a few mouse clicks away. We overclock, then we underclock... Well, why not? Almost all the GeForce 8800GTS in the market right now have their 2D/3D clock speeds replicated, so the card still runs at default 3D clock speeds, even while you stay on desktop to surf web and check email.

Zotac looks to be moving fast, even while it's official website are in the midst of completion, it's products are already flooding the shelves. And these cards are priced pretty aggressively, online, the Zotac GeForce 8800 GTS 320MB are found for around $299. The Zotac GeForce 8800 GTS 320MB looks to be a real bargain, I'm looking forward to some nice prices on these cards. They seem to be premium clocked cards priced at normal enthusiasts' dollar level. Again, I'm quite impressed by the 320MB version, because the performance is quite difficult to beat at the same price.