Zotac Nitro

With the Nitro, Zotac is looking to make graphics card overclocking simple and straightforward. Has the company succeeded?

We’re thrilled to the say the answer is yes. The Nitro is an external hardware controller that you can use to manipulate a GPU’s various settings including GPU clock, shader clock, memory and even the speed of the cooling fan.

With the various clock settings, you can increase or decrease speed by 5MHz whereas the fan speed can be increased or decreased in 5% increments. For those that want the Nitro to handle cooling affairs, there’s also an auto setting.

We used a Zotac GeForce GTX 280 AMP! Edition card to test the Nitro and the device has three useable buttons on its front face – Set, Profiles and Defaults. The last button resets the card to its original settings while the profiles button allows you to store and load overclocking profiles.

To overclock a card, you have to hit the first button after which point the other two buttons allow you to increase or reduce the selected setting. This worked flawlessly during testing and we were able to overclock our GPU whilst playing a game with no noticeable issues. Once we pushed our card as far as it could go, we created a profile and were able to load it instantly at a later time. Simple.