Thursday, December 8th 2011
Zalman Enters Graphics Card Business, Starts Selling AMD Radeon
Korean company Zalman, known more for its innovative PC air cooling solutions, PSUs, and cases, entered the graphics card business. The company is now an AMD Radeon add-in board (AIB) partner, and started its lineup off with some upper-mainstream models. It makes perfect sense for Zalman to enter this business, as it holds some expertise with high-end graphics card cooling solutions. Zalman can source PCBs from any of the major foundries such as PC Partner, Hightech Information Systems, or TUL, and assemble its coolers on top of them. Zalman's first three graphics cards are based on Radeon HD 6870, HD 6850, and HD 6770, with AMD reference clock speeds. What markets Zalman will target its new graphics card lineup with, is not known.
Source:
Overclockers.ua
35 Comments on Zalman Enters Graphics Card Business, Starts Selling AMD Radeon
The only problem here might be that you'd possibly end up with a very good cooler, but the rest is questionable. If the PCB is stock, then the price would be the only incentive to buy a card that has a pre-install custom cooler. Otherwise, buying a card with a PCB that a company took a long time to design and then placing a custom GPU cooler on it would seem like the better choice.
I hope and look forward to their contribution to the upcoming 7 Series and hope they innovate a little with them. Might even pull me away from my deadset GPU provider Sapphire.
good luck zalman!!!
Once VGA sales are going, they can take the profits to re-invest in new products, so the risk for them is only ever just the original investment. If you want to sell 100,000 VGAs, and you need that many aftermarket coolers, and they cost $15 each, that's 1.5 million for coolers alone, plus the cost of the cards.
They are using a design similar to other cards becuase the company that makes those cards has extra capacity. Buying established models cuts down on R&D costs, as well as providing (ideally) decent availability of parts, with minimal investment. They can just buy these cards, and profit. The chosen models are some of the highest-selling SKUs, too.