Zotac GTX 980 Ti AMP! Edition Graphics Card Review

Admin Video Cards 5022

Overall, a massive improvement over the reference design, Nvidia take note! Triple fan designs are our favourite, have a look at the PNY XLR8 GeForce GTX 770 – Enthusiast Edition, the Sapphire Radeon R9 Fury Tri-X OC and the Sapphire Radeon R9 290X Vapor-X Tri-X to see what we mean! We would always prefer a water cooling set up, but if you can’t manage it, three fans will do instead.

The card is long but most normal mid-towers will cope with the length. Recommended PSU for this card is 600W as a minimum. We think most people will know what this card is all about, and will most likely either have a system that will support it, or be planning a system that will support it. That said, installing a graphics card with a PSU that’s not powerful enough to power it, can lead to lock ups, unexpected reboots and even hardware damage. We would recommend at least an 850W PSU for this card.

Zotac GTX 980 Ti AMP! Edition

Test Set Up

We recently changed our testing set up to an X99 Chipset supporting DDR4, 2011-3 Socket CPU and some serious power and bandwidth for the GPU to play with. All updates to the Operating System, games and synthetic benchmarks are assumed, and a full de-fragmentation on the SSD after a fresh install before any benches are carried out.

We will be testing in 1080p and UHD resolutions using the ViewSonic VP2780-4K 27-Inch UltraHD IPS Monitor.

Default driver settings were used for synthetic and gaming tests, we only changed the game settings to push the resolutions, we maintained the Ultra quality settings throughout. All game tests have the game settings screenshot included.

The games and synthetic benchmarks are full patched as well, though they may change the net performance from time to time, only the fundamentally flawed games or apps would have a significant performance jump when patched, and we don’t use them for testing. Also, Futuremarks’ systeminfo needs to be fully up to date before you can call a benchmark result valid.

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.