The Packaging
The box and packaging is pretty large. It list the selling features of the card, which includes the Ice-Storm cooling, Exoarmor, Freeze Tech, EKO fan and of course it’s VR-Ready.
Inside the box, you’ll find Zotac GeForce GTX 1080 card protected in an anti-static bubble bag. The whole thing is surround in thick polystyrene foam packaging. It’s really protected. There’s also 2 PCI-E power cables, some instruction manual and a DVD containing the graphics card drivers.
A Closer Look
The card is massive. It takes up 3 PCI slot space. Yes 3 slot space. So make sure your ATX has enough room for this beast. And one more thing … this graphics card is heavy! Weighing in at around 1.4Kg that’s almost 3lbs! No wonder motherboard manufacturers are having to fortify their PCI-E slots.
There are 3 so called EKO fans which Zotac claim to increase airflow for superior cooling. These fans only spin when the card reaches a certain temperature, and this is controlled by their Ice-Storm cooling system with 6 massive heatpipes. On the I/O panel, you find 3 Displayport, 1 HDMI and one DVI connector, which is more than enough for most users.
To power the card, you need 2 x 8-pin PCI-E power connectors. This is a must.
More Photos
The Zotac GeForce GTX 1080 AMP Extreme comes with a functional aesthetic backplate called Exoarmor, which is wrapped round the card. It’s an additional feature of the Ice-Storm cooling system, which provides protection and durability.
The Card – Dissected
You won’t find the standard GeForce GTX 1080 CPU on the Zotac AMP Extreme. They’ve increased the standard base clock rate from 1607MHz to 1771MHz, and with Zotac’s Firestorm overclocking utility, you can further increase the clock speeds to a whopping 1911MHz or higher! Below is a photo of the GPU – Nvidia’s GP104-400 graphics processor.
And that’s why you need massive cooling. The Ice-Storm cooling system comes with 6 massive heatpipes and is cooled by 3 intelligent EKO fans.
Now most graphics card on the market uses GDDR5, but the GeForce GTX 1080 AMP Extreme from Zotac uses GDDR5X memory chips are made by Micron. They’re marked with “D9TXS” and they ‘re specified to run at 1,250 MHz, that’s 10,000 MHz effective (1,250 x 4 x 2).
5 comments
A big thank for this very useful review. I have just buy this BIG card and waiting for her. For information can you tell me wath is the thickness of the thermal pads. Thanks.
“It will be interesting to see how this card (or any other GTX 1080) will perform, when compared against the AMD Radeon RX480”
Is this a joke??? Everybody knows that the 480 is 2 levels behind this card…2×480 won’t even match a 1080.
[censored]
Yup, this is not the end of the end of the review. We’ll be testing the Zotac GeForce GTX 1080 AMP Extreme Edition against other GTX 1080 as well. Plus we will revisit the benchmarks as soon as we have a better OC’ing setup.
Doom uses OpenGL or Vulkan, not DX12 as you put in the benchmark image.
Let me amend it. Thanks for the info.