ZOTAC GeForce GTX 980 Ti AMP! Extreme Edition Video Card Review

Introduction

I've been a fan of ZOTAC's video cards for a while now, but when I saw their GTX 980 Ti AMP! Extreme Edition card at Computex this year, I knew I had to have it. It was going to be a beast, but now that it's here and I've reviewed it, you're going to see this is the fastest single video card in the world.

Not only does it beat the reference GTX 980 Ti by at least 10% in every test, but it does so using just a little more power, all while it looks great. ZOTAC's AMP! Extreme range of cards are always, well, extreme. But the GeForce GTX 980 Ti AMP! Extreme Edition takes it to a whole new level with its massive cooler and huge clock speeds.

I'll leave you with this tease for our introduction in our review for our ZOTAC GeForce GTX 980 Ti AMP! Extreme Edition: it is the fastest card we've tested yet. We've seen it smash the reference GTX 980 Ti, and the HBM-based AMD Radeon R9 Fury X.

Quick Specs

ZOTAC has the usual 2816 CUDA cores on its GM200 GPU, but has increased the reference Core and Boost clocks from the stock 1000MHz and 1075MHz (Core and Boost, respectively) to a huge 1253MHz and 1355MHz. This results in a massive increase in performance, thanks to the GM200 core that powers the GTX 980 Ti having so much headroom for overclocking.

The GTX 980 Ti AMP! Extreme Edition sees the 6GB of GDDR5 overclocked, up from the 7000MHz on the reference card, to 7220MHz. This overclock on the VRAM increases the memory bandwidth from 336.5GB/sec to 346.6GB/sec on the ZOTAC card. We have a 384-bit memory bus, and our testing will show that the huge 4096-bit memory bus on the Fury X with its HBM doesn't begin to compete with what ZOTAC has here with the GTX 980 Ti AMP! Extreme Edition.

Availability & Price

The ZOTAC GeForce GTX 980 Ti AMP! Extreme Edition is available on Amazon for $699.95 with stock available now. With some of the competing cards from EVGA, ASUS and MSI being more expensive, ZOTAC has a huge win here with the price right now.