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Unboxing the Zotac GTX 980 Ti AMP! Extreme
The card comes in a sturdy box that adequate protects the valuable card.
As you can see the card is well protect4ed with lots of hard foam around the card. The days with tons of stuff in tthe bundle is gone and thus we get the bare necessities.
- CD with drivers and the Zotac OC-software FireStorm on.
- A DVI to VGA-adapter
- Two 6-pin to 8-pin PCI-power-adapters
And that’s it. Something that no longer is included in these cards are an SLI-bridge, something we realized when we wanted to test SLI. You will have to buy a separate bridge for that.
And here it is! The Beast. The Hulk. The … ok – we’re out of names describing this huge card. The card is 328mm long, 133m high and weighs 1,285g. Did we mention it is huge? And heavy? Make sure to secure the card to the chassi. The card will take up 3(!) slots so make sure you have room. The weird thing is that Zotac does not even include the measurements of the card on their website. So a buyer might not realize that this is a beast of a card when buying it and realizing to late it won’t fit the case.
Just to give you an idea how big this card is. This is a comparison between the eVGA GTX 980 Ti SuperClocked card we reviewed earlier and the Zotac GTX 980 TI AMP! Extreme.When we put them together for some SLI-action it was almost comical to see the difference. It is as the eVGA GTX 980 Ti SuperClocked is a small distant cousin, not a card using the same high-end GPU.
The front is taken up by the three fans of the IceStorm cooler.Here you can see the small mini-blades that are supposed to concentrate the air flow towards the middle of the card increasing the air pressure.
How are you providing SLI results with a slower card in the pool? The Zotac clocks down to match the slower card to create equal performance. Essentially you posted results of the eVga card in SLI mode, not the Zotac. Also, the system you are benching on appears to be gen 2 not gen 3 pcie. You’re not getting the full 40 lanes out the Zotac… I assume these things will have an effect on your test results, no? i have this Zotac card and feel with the configuration and testing method you didn’t do it justice, it’s my first Zotac, coming from eVga 780 then 980’s all in SLI and find the new AMP Extreme a mind blowing experience. Extremely curious to see a what a “real” real-world test of two AMP! Extremes running in SLI with full gen 3 support active.
Well, until I get two of these cards to play with any SLI-tests will be affected by the difference in clockspeed. That said I could follow the clock speed in GPU-Z and each card was actually running at their relative speeds so it doesn’t seem it is clocking down – however it needs to be in sync so yes, we do get a bit slower SLI-results than we could get. The SLI numbers though is more to show what SLi can do for you. you are correct that I am rocking on an older gen mobo/CPU which I noted in my test-rig info and I am in the process of swapping everything out for Skylake the coming days so unless Zotac needs the card back ASAP i hope to get some new SLi-testing in during next week.
I just picked up a Skylake i7-6700K and the ASUS Z710 Deluxe (http://www.asus.com/US/Motherboards/Z170-DELUXE/) and will instalkl everything and then do some SLI-testing to see if the scaling changes.
Might be powerful, but I don’t trust Zotac 😛
Zotac is a more reliable edition compared to the plain but you’ll never get anything special and you’re likely to pay more. Then again if you’re looking for a more stable version of a unit where the special things like the 20th edition 980 for example mean nothing, zotac is the way to go.
I’ve tested a bunch of Zotac cards and their AMP! edition cards always worked well and provided nice overclocking featrures and good cooling. Still, even the “reference” cards of the 980 Ti overclock well so in the end you have to see how much you value factory overclocking and different coolers.
A fan of Zotac. They get the most out of their GPU’s but as a result, suffer limited longevity. I’ve had 2 of their cards die on me, roughly as I was just about to upgrade to the next version. Meanwhile all stock frequency cards I have from other brands (as far back as GeForce3) live to this day. On most cards the fans will wear out after about 3-4 years of regular use. In Zotac cards the GPU has a similar lifespan, which shouldn’t be an issue if you’re chasing high frequencies and tend to upgrade often.
May as well buy reference card
At that price I’d rather get a FuryX…