Mushkin Branches Out, Again

Long known as one of the purveyors of some of the best, and fastest memory available (does anyone else remember PC150 DRAMs? Mushkin had them when all others only had PC133), Mushkin has decided to move into the video card market.

It was not that long ago that Mushkin began to release its own line of very nice power supplies. The PSUs are quite nice, but don’t really distinguish themselves in a land of many quality PSUs.

Now, Mushkin once again has strayed from memory products, this time lending its name to a line of nVidia graphics cards.

Best known for its memory, Mushkin is also trying to make a name for itself in the graphics card market, so in a new effort to get noticed, it is going to introduce the ultimateFX family of cards. The new cards are all powered by GT200 GPUs and will come in some nice but not very eco-friendly wooden boxes.

The ultimateFX line-up includes the following models:

- GeForce GTX 260 896MB
- GeForce GTX 260 1792MB
- GeForce GTX 260 OC 896MB
- GeForce GTX 260 OC2 896MB
- GeForce GTX 275 896MB
- GeForce GTX 275 OC 896MB
- GeForce GTX 275 OC2 896MB
- GeForce GTX 285 1GB
- GeForce GTX 285 2GB

at least there are no garish pictures on the side of the cards – though that might be detrimental, considering the average high-end video card buyer.

Some of the cards have already started to be listed in stores.

Almost as a nod to the fact that Mushkin is big in memory, all the cards have copious amounts of buffer memory. No wimpy 512 MB cards found here!

Again, it will be interesting to see how Mushkin distinguishes itself with these cards. The company has never had anything that required coding of any sort, so the chances of veering from a reference design are slim (which is actually a good thing, it means that using nVidia drivers will never be a problem). Perhaps Mushkin, who was one of the first manufacturers to offer lifetime warranty for its RAM, will make itself a bit different by offering  a beefed-up warranty for their video offerings.

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