NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 Ti shootout: The fastest cards money can buy
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Zotac GeForce GTX 1080 Ti AMP Extreme
Zotac GeForce GTX 1080 Ti AMP Extreme
Zotac is going after those who are looking for raw out-of-the-box performance with its AMP Extreme card. A look at the specifications shows that this is actually the highest clocked card of the lot, and it runs at around 100MHz higher than the MSI card at default settings, with a 1,645MHz base clock and 1,759MHz boost clock.
Unlike with some of the other cards, you also won't need to install any utilities to activate those speeds, and it'll run at the highest rated clocks right out of the box.
However, while that’s nice to look at in theory, the 100MHz boost doesn’t quite translate into a large gain in practice, so clock speeds really shouldn’t be all you look at when choosing a card. Still, this is Zotac’s flagship, and it is every inch a hulking, imposing beast.
At 325mm long and with three 90mm fans, this card requires a ton of space. You'll definitely want to check if you have enough clearance in your case, and some chassis may even require you to remove the front HDD cage to make room. The card is also rather thick at 56.6mm tall, so you’ll need three PCIe slots to have room for it. Furthermore, this is quite a loud card, so be prepared to put up with some noise.
A copper base plate is in direct contact with the GPU, and there’s a larger aluminum plate around it to help with cooling for the memory. Four 6mm and two 8mm composite heatpipes then channel heat away to the large heatsink array. The aluminum plate around the copper base plate is sort of similar to what Gigabyte did, but the main difference is that Gigabyte's design features a single, large copper plate for both the GPU and VRAM.
Nevertheless, this aluminum plate is also attached to the heatsink, so the memory chips can benefit from the greater surface area for heat dissipation.
The VRM components get their share of attention too, but it’s less comprehensive of a solution than on the Aorus or MSI cards. A black, finned heatsink sits above the VRM, but this appears to have been placed in isolation, and Zotac unfortunately hasn’t done anything to facilitate contact with the main heatsink.
That’s a good opportunity wasted, and some of the airflow from the fans that might serve to cool the VRM heatsink is even blocked by a rubber dampener on the main fin stack, as it’s located close to where the VRM heatsink is.
The 16+2-phase power design is also achieved using phase doublers, the same as almost everyone else, so there’s nothing really special in this respect either.
When it comes to the display outputs, there's the usual selection of three DisplayPort, one HDMI, and one DVI-D output.
Finally, a metal backplate supports the card, and you can see below how it wraps around to the front and sides of the card as well. This is one of the main differentiating factors between Zotac's AMP Edition and AMP Extreme cards, as the former's backplate just lays flat and doesn't go round the sides.
You'll also notice two PowerBoost chips sticking out through the backplate. These are capacitors that help smooth out voltage spikes, and according to Zotac, these act to regulate current, reduce ripple noise, and minimize power fluctuations for greater stability and longevity.
The AMP Extreme is a literal heavyweight looking to play with the big boys, and there’s no doubt that it’s very fast. However, it loses out on certain design decisions, and overall feels slightly less polished than some of the competition. That said, at S$1,279, it's still a reasonably feature-rich card for its price that serves up some of the speediest factory overclocks around.
