This company boasts large number of engineers who specialize in creating custom designs for the numerous OEMs, and PALIT Multimedia itself is the largest manufacturer of Nvidia graphics cards. If you are wondering what’s up with this intro, the answer is quite simple. Back on Nvision 2008, we spoke with the Palit North American team and they shed us some light on the future of the company, and those conversations are now coming to life.

View of the custom card, courtesy of Expreview.com

PALIT plans to offer a lot of custom designs onto the market for both ATI and Nvidia cards, and future designs will be geared towards price flexibility from one side and highest performance from another. The time for custom-time for building GTX260 1.8GB and GTX285 2GB cards is approaching, but that will not be the only change that is coming – PALIT paired up with Danger Den to create a special line of GPU cards, and that will include both ATI and Nvidia ones.

Palit mastered ATI with custom-built triple-slot Radeon  4870X2 (sold by Gainward and Palit), and the time has come for custom-designed Nvidia card with blue PCB, this time branded as Galaxy (Galaxy – blue, Gainward – red, Palit – all of the above ). You can expect a lot of custom designs for high-end cards as well, especially when GDDR5 takes over and enables PALIT to experiment with PCB layout even more (with GDDR3, your hands were tied). Besides PALIT, the only two companies that experiment with custom built high-end cards are ASUS and EVGA.

All in all, 2009 is looking to be a great year for enthusiasts, with some real unique products coming to market. We’re looking forward in seeing custom-design GTX285.

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But, in the past 48 hours I spoke with three different Nvidia AIBs… their names will remain unknown, of course – I was told that since Rel180 came out, they all have a spike in tech support. Issues range from temp and fan speeds not being reported correctly, to game crashes. After doing internal testing, all three vendors started to advise users to roll back to a previous driver version – and miracle happened. Systems became stable again.

So, what is going on? I sent out couple of e-mails out, and judging by first response I got (off-the-record), it seems that Big Bang II drivers introduced rewrite at the way how temperatures are addressed. This caused all sorts of malfunctions in thermal monitoring software, and at the moment, there is no easy way to correctly find out what is the temperature of the graphics card – unless you can touch it, that is.

I checked the only two GTX280 cards I have, PALIT GeForce GTX280 1GB and EVGA’s GeForce GTX280 Superclocked and saw small, but noticable difference in temperatures between the two driver revisions (178.24 and 180.48)… 2-3 degrees, but still noticable. 

The “crash” we experienced is the fact that the fan will not spin up on Superclocked card, and this caused some errors with Crysis Warhead. On 178.24, there are no issues.  With Big Bang II drivers, the card is producing a lot of errors in Crysis Warhead and does not want to launch CoD5 at all. 

Al in all, weird situation.

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