Nvidia’s flagship consumer GPU, the GeForce GTX 980 Ti, might be starting to feel a bit long in the tooth at this stage of its life cycle, but it’s still the most potent single-chip card you can buy. And with most DirectX 12 titles (as well as Nvidia’s next-generation architecture) still presumably a ways off, the GTX 980 Ti is still a great investment in a high-frame-rate future. Nothing at the moment can top it, not even the water-cooled AMD Radeon R9 Fury X. So the GTX 980 Ti it will undoubtedly remain the best “flagship” GPU until both AMD and Nvidia release their die-shrunk Polaris and Pascal GPUs sometime in later 2016.
Review Cooler Zotac GeForce GTX 980 Ti Amp Extreme
Though the GeForce GTX 980 Ti is an excellent card on its own, it can also be considered a mere canvas on which third-party companies can paint their masterpieces. You see, when most new GPUs are launched, AMD or Nvidia provides its partners with a “reference design,” the equivalent of a stock or base-model car, and then allows board sellers like Asus, MSI, Gigabyte, EVGA, Sapphire, and others to tweak the card in substantial ways. Some companies prefer to slap on a fancy cooler; some juice the core clock and memory speeds a bit. And some do both.
Review Cooler Zotac GeForce GTX 980 Ti Amp Extreme
In Zotac’s case, it did all of the above and more with its oversized, overclocked, and over-everything GeForce GTX 980 Ti Amp Extreme card. The list of changes made to this card in the name of extreme performance is long and a bit awesome, so let’s take a look at the items one-by-one.
First off, this is easily one of the largest video cards we’ve ever seen, even out-bulking some dual-GPU monsters like the GeForce GTX Titan Z. We had to remind ourselves to lift with our legs, pulling it out of the box.
We kid, of course. But the card is well heavier than most. Instead of being a dual-slot card like the majority of the GTX 980 Ti’s on the market, the Amp Extreme is extra-wide and extra-long, taking up three PCI Express slot positions side-to-side and incorporating a massive shroud with three fans. The card measures 12.9 inches long, which is a whopping 2.4 inches longer than the reference design from Nvidia.
It’s also surprisingly thick; it takes up the space of nearly three full expansion slots, and the card occupied nearly the entire upper portion of our motherboard after we installed it. It also requires a bit more juice than the reference design, eschewing the standard 6-pin and 8-pin connector requirement in favor of two 8-pin sockets. Zotac provides two 6-pin-to-8-pin adapters in the box, which can be quite handy if your power supply isn’t already well-equipped for high-end cards.
Sitting atop the card is a massive metal cooling contraption, laden with buzzwords. First off, the shroud surrounding the cooling mechanism itself is named “Carbon ExoArmor,” and it wraps around the top, sides, and back forming a sort of metal “skin” enveloping the GPU. It consists of a thick metal backplate, as well as a metal shroud with “carbon detailing” to make it look cool (pun entirely intended).
Under the shroud lies the monstrous cooling mechanism, which Zotac calls IceStorm—and no, that’s not a joke. The cooler uses a traditional design of aluminum fins with copper heat pipes, but also an unconventional fan design the company dubs “EKO Fan.” This fan, which Zotac says is patented, uses an interesting “blade within a blade” design.
Miniature fan blades are located near the center of the fans themselves; Zotac says that that reduces the “dead zone” at the center of the fan blade, improving airflow by 30 percent. That’s not something we can really measure, but as we’ll touch on later, the card is certainly quiet for a top-end performer, and high temperatures were never an issue in our testing. Here’s a closeup of the fan blades.
Now the point of all this extravagant cooling is to give the card plenty of headroom for overclocking. And the reason the Amp Extreme card costs about $50 more than the reference model of the GeForce GTX 980 Ti is because of that extra cooling—and the extra performance it allows.
This card is clocked considerably higher on both the core clock and memory fronts than a reference GTX 980 Ti. The Amp Extreme runs at a base clock of 1,253MHz, which is more than a little mind-boggling considering the 1,000MHz core clock on the reference design. Most of the time, aftermarket cards with extravagant cooling offer an out-of-the-box overclock of around 50MHz to 100MHz; 253MHz is quite impressive, and merits the “Extreme” in the card name.
The boost clock has also been dialed up as well, hitting an astonishing 1,355MHz under load, 280MHz higher than the standard stock card’s boost rating. Keep in mind that you might see even better results than this, too, as the boost clock is simply an estimate of what clock speed the card will typically reach under load. On our test bench, we saw the card hit 1,417MHz right out of the box at default settings, which is phenomenal for a GTX 980 Ti. We were even able to overclock it a bit higher, but more on that later. The memory is also substantially overclocked by 220MHz, to an effective 7,220MHz.
We’ve looked at a few versions of the GeForce GTX 980 Ti, and competing high-end AMD models, as well. So the Zotac GeForce GTX 980 Ti Amp Extreme faces plenty of competition in our benchmark testing. Zotac’s card is going up against the water-cooled MSI GTX 980 Ti Sea Hawk, an MSI/Corsair collaboration card that was scarce when we wrote this in early February 2016, selling for close to $1,000. We’ll also compare the Zotac card to the stock version of the GeForce GTX 980 Ti, so you can see what kind of extra performance you’ll get for opting for this extremely overclocked alternative.
On the AMD side, this Amp Extreme is a natural competitor to the Radeon R9 Fury X, which is liquid-cooled and sells for $650, but isn’t quite as powerful as the Nvidia GeForce GTX 980 Ti on the whole, based on our testing. We’re also pitting it against AMD’s dual-GPU, water-cooled monstrosity, the venerable AMD Radeon R9 295X2, which is also difficult to find online and costs around $600 to $700 depending on what eBay is up to these days.
In the box, the Amp Extreme’s bundle includes the 6-to-8-pin adapters, a DVI-to-VGA adapter, and a two-year warranty, along with a paper quick-installation guide, and a CD with drivers and software. Okay, let’s get this beast in our testbed and see what it can do.
Source: computershopper.com
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