ZOTAC International today unleashes the award-winning ZOTAC NITRO hardware-overclocking controller for use with all NVIDIA GeForce based graphics cards. The ZOTAC NITRO is the world's first hardware-overclocking controller, enabling graphics card overclocking with the press of three buttons. "End users demanded that we open up the NITRO hardware for use with non-ZOTAC graphics cards. We listened, and with a software update, the ZOTAC NITRO will work with all NVIDIA GeForce based graphics cards," said Carsten Berger, marketing director, ZOTAC International.

Zotac released the Nitro OC Panel device back in August, making it proprietary for use by owners of Zotac graphics hardware. The panel provides quick-access controls to the video cards' clock speeds, and also keeps the users posted, on parameters such as fan speeds and temperatures. Being a proprietary tool, users of graphics cards made by other manufacturers couldn't use the device, since at its software back-end, the Firestorm software would run compatibility checks.

Italian website NextHardware discovered a trick to evade the compatibility check by simply holding down the "shift" key while clicking on OK when the dialog box showing compatibility failure appears. The latest version of Firestorm software that supports this hack can be downloaded from here.