Zotac GTX 980 Ti AMP! Edition Graphics Card Review

Admin Video Cards 5378

Introduction

This will probably be our last GTX 980 Ti review before the next generation of cards from Nvidia are released. The speculation is they will be named the GTX 1070 and GTX 1080 continuing the product naming convention Nvidia have been using for quite a while now. If you forget the GTX Titan cards, out of the budget of most the natural flagship card is the Ti, at least judging by the GTX 980 Ti range and its performance. The production run has now been stopped, and less than a year after it started.

This will also probably mean there will be a GTX 1080 Titan and possibly a GTX 1080 Ti edition too. Before you think about upgrading, should you be overlooking the GTX 980 Ti, especially the releases with custom cooling solutions and core overclocks?

Either way, let’s look at the Zotac GTX 980 Ti AMP! Edition, a very different looking Zotac release compared to their stock reference cooler product, the Zotac Nvidia GTX 980 Ti. A card we loved, but only because of the performance, not because it looked especially good or set itself apart from the rest of the vanilla releases.

Zotac have labelled this the AMP! Edition, their own premium branding and something that would suggest it can’t get any better from the team at Zotac. It’s already sounding interesting!

Specifications

Zotac GTX 980 Ti AMP! EditionGeForce GTX 980 TiGeForce GTX 980GeForce GTX TITAN X
Stream Processors2816281620483072
Core ClockBase: 1051 MHz
Boost: 1140 MHz
1000MHz1126MHz1000MHz
Texture Units176176128192
ROPs96966496
Video RAM6GB GDDR56GB GDDR54GB GDDR512GB GDDR5
Memory Clock7010MHz7010MHz7010MHz7010MHz
Memory Bus Width384-bit384-bit256-bit384-bit
Transistor Count8 Billion8 Billion5.2 Billion8 Billion
Manufacturing ProcessTSMC 28nmTSMC 28nmTSMC 28nmTSMC 28nm
GPUGM200GM200GM204GM200
Launch Date17/06/1501/06/1518/09/1417/03/15

Product Gallery

A nice clean box, and in much better condition than the Palit Super Jetstream GTX 980 Ti when it arrived.

Zotac GTX 980 Ti AMP! Edition

There are three AMP! editions, this is the “entry” AMP! edition with the AMP! Omega and the AMP! Extreme topping off the range.

Zotac GTX 980 Ti AMP! Edition Graphics Card Review

Package and Bundle - 8
Performance - 7.5
Price - 7.5
Consumer Experience - 8

7.8

Our biggest issue with this card is that it's not special enough. Sure a core and memory frequency increase are good as standard and the GTX 980 Ti core is excellent, but we think the only advantage in owning this card over the reference design is cooling, and therefore overclocking. You may get a good overclocking baseline out of this card due to the good cooling solution, and it will help with sound performance, but the Palit Super Jetstream GTX 980 Ti outperforms it on most tests.