CeBIT 2009 3-8 March, Hannover (Germany), day 4

Page 5 - ZOTAC: Motherboards and Video Controllers

Maybe many of you do not know or at least did not know till recently the name ZOTAC. There is no other way as the company was established in 2006. The interesting part is that for the three years since its creation, ZOTAC became one of the LARGEST manufacturers of NVidia products – motherboards and video controllers. Their marketing strategy is aggressive, ZOTAC’s video controller reviews are found in even more hardware sites and for some time Solytron import them in Bulgaria, so their product can be found at many distributers of computer hardware. At the last CeBit this was maybe one of the best prepared companies. They showed us special approach and invited us at their hidden part of the stand, where we saw things that we could not see anywhere else.

At ZOTAC’s place there were displayed some of their more special products. There were high end vide cards, referent (regular) and overclocked models (ZOTAC AMP! Edition), including such with bundled water cooling (ZOTAC Infinity Edition). The most current ones were the released just before the expo GeForce GTX 285 & GTX 295. Also ZOTAC had put on display some of their motherboards. Even though the company aligns strictly to the NVidia camp, ZOTAC had a single Intel (X58) based motherboard. On the other side, Core i7 is the only platform for which NVidia do not have chipset and on the other hand X58 is the only chipset that supports NVidia SLI, so the scales are evened :)

ZOTAC presented their GeForce 9300-ITX WiFi – ITX motherboard with integrated video controller, capable of decoding HD with built in WiFi module with Core 2 processor socket. Everything you might want from a HTPC platform, car board computer or minimalistic and super power effective computer. Another special product, which the company since recently manufactures, is ZOTAC Nitro. This is small console for the overclock maniacs which controls the video controller and system frequencies in real time while you make benchmarks. The purpose of this is when you are going after 3DMark record, the system is overclocked at the limit of its capabilities and even past them. Your computer may be relevantly stable, but just at a certain spot, where the test is particularly heavy, the system hangs. With ZOTAC Nitro you can lower the frequency with 10-15 MHz right before that spot and thus completing the test successfully.