Precoding methods at the Base Station (BS) can be used to deal with the inter-cell interference and improve the signal quality of the user especially at the cell edge. In this paper, a novel Zero-Forcing (ZF) precoding method is proposed and investigated for multi-cell Multi-Input Multi-Output (MIMO) systems. We propose a relaxed ZF precoding method by relaxing the ZF criterion to some degree so that the inter-cell interference may not be zero. Complexity analysis shows that compared with the conventional ZF method, the additional computation complexity for the proposed method is trivial. Simulation results show that the proposed relaxed ZF method has better performance than the conventional ZF method in terms of the sum-rate, especially at low Signal to Noise Ratio (SNR). Precoding methods at the Base Station (BS) can be used to deal with the inter-cell interference and improve the signal quality of the user especially at the cell edge. In this paper, a novel Zero-Forcing (ZF) precoding method is proposed and investigated for multi-cell Multi-Input Multi-Output (MIMO) systems. We propose a relaxed ZF precoding method by relaxing the ZF criterion to some degree so that the inter-cell interference may not be zero. the conventional ZF method, the additional computation complexity for the proposed method is trivial. Simulation results show that the proposed relaxed ZF method has better performance than the conventional ZF method in terms of the sum-rate, especially at low Signal to Noise Ratio (SNR ).