ZOTAC GeForce GTX 580 AMP²! Edition

The ZOTAC GeForce® GTX 580 AMP²! Edition is the flagship GTX580-card from Zotac and is not only pre-overclocked but also comes with 3 GB memory and a Zalman VF3000 cooler.

Introduction

The GeForce GTX580 is one of the fastest cards available at this time and therefore it is not surprising that a a lot of companies have released their own versions of it. Zotac is no different and currently have a range of GTX580-cards in their arsenal. The card we are testing today, the ZOTAC GeForce® GTX 580 AMP²! Edition, is one of their flagship products only eclipsed by their GTX590-card. Not only does it come with a GPU-clockspeed of 815 MHz (up from 772 MHz) and a memory clockspeed of 4100 MHz (up from 4008 MHz), it also has 3 GB of memory instead of the regular 1.5 GB and a Zalman VF3000 cooler that promises great cooling with little or no noise.

Features and Specification

TESTING METHOLOGY

Overclocking

SYNTHETIC BENCHMARKS

Our first batch of benchmarks are synthetic benchmarks, which try to simulate a real life situation.

“3DMark 11 is the latest version of the world’s most popular benchmark for measuring the graphics performance of gaming PCs. Designed for testing DirectX 11 hardware running on Windows 7 and Windows Vista the benchmark includes six all new benchmark tests that make extensive use of all the new features in DirectX 11 including tessellation, compute shaders and multi-threading. After running the tests 3DMark gives your system a score with larger numbers indicating better performance. Trusted by gamers worldwide to give accurate and unbiased results, 3DMark 11 is the best way to test DirectX 11 under game-like loads.”

The Zotax GTX580 Amp2 Edition is the fastest card in this test. We do not see a huge improvement in performance over a regular GTX580, at least not until we overclock it. 

DX10 GAMING: JUST CAUSE 2

“Just Cause 2 is an open world action-adventure video game. It was released in North America on March 23, 2010, by Swedish developer Avalanche Studios and Eidos Interactive, and was published by Square Enix. It is the sequel to the 2006 video game Just Cause.

Just Cause 2 employs the Avalanche Engine 2.0, an updated version of the engine used in Just Cause. The game is set on the other side of the world from the original Just Cause, on the fictional island of Panau in Southeast Asia. Panau has varied terrain, from desert to alpine to rainforest. Rico Rodriguez returns as the protagonist, aiming to overthrow the evil dictator Pandak “Baby” Panay and confront his former mentor, Tom Sheldon.”

Again the card is the fastest among the cards in the test. This time we definitely see that the extra clockspeed of the Zotac GTX580 Amp2 is giving the card an edge over a regular GTX580. Overclocking the card sees the performance skyrocket and we get between 13-20% higher framerates than with the “regular” Amp2-speeds. 

DX10 GAMING: CRYSIS WARHEAD

Crysis Warhead is the much anticipated standalone expansion pack to Crysis, featuring an updatedCryENGINE™ 2 with better optimization. It was one of the most anticipated titles of 2008.

Crysis Warhead is starting to show its age and it is very likely that we are cpu-bound with the GTX580 as we see no big difference either betweeh 1280×720 and 1920×1200 or between the different GTX580 cards. 

DX11 Gaming: Crysis 2

Crysis 2 is the long awaited sequel to the popular fps Crysis and was released in march 2011. At that time it did not come with DX11 support and that was instead added in a patch in end of june 2011 together with a hi-res texture pack for the game.

This is yet another game where the increased clockspeed of the Zotac GTX580 Amp2-card is resulting in increased framerates. Overclocking the card gives us up to 13% higher framerates which is not bad at all. Even though we do not hit the magic 60 fps-mark at 1920×1200 getting an average of 50 fps with these high settings is impressive.

DX11 Gaming: Dirt 3

Dirt 3 is the sequel to the popular Dirt 2-game and of course comes with tons of cool graphical features including DX11-support. 

Dirt 3 also benefits from the additional MHz of the Zotac GTX580 Amp2 and again the overclocked card impresses us with 10-13% higher framerates. 

Temperature and Noise

While it is nice to get good performance we still do not want a card that runs hot and/or is noisy. It is therefore very nice to see that the Zalman VF3000 cooler manages not only to keep the card running cool, we never went over 65 Celcius in any of our prolonged tests, but also keeps the noise at a minimum. In fact, as far as we could hear even when the card was running at full load we could not hear the fans over the rest of the (silent) system. 

Conclusion

It is easy to be impressed with the ZOTAC GeForce® GTX 580 AMP²! Edition. Not only is this a fast card but it is also very overclockable and still runs cool and silent. Add the extra memory that should help if you need resolutions over 1900×1200 and a nice bundle we end up with a card that really has few if any flaws.

The only flaw we really can see is that the price at around 450£ (we could not find a US price at the time of writing but it should be around 550-600$) which is quite expensive compared to other GTX580 as well as close to the price of a HD6990 which is a faster (but also noisier) card.