[section_title title=”Closer Look”]
Closer Look
As far as graphics cards and their coolers go, there’s only so much variation one can imagine when it comes to designing it and although most cards look very similar, they all have their distinctive differences such as the fan choice, colours of said fan and/or its shroud, fin density and heatpipe configurations. The ZOTAC GTX 770 AMP! Edition card features a dual fan design which has an orange tint to it. It’s not a completely solid colour, and I happen to find it very appealing! It’s different than most manufacturers who decide to go with plain and boring black, each and every single time.
If you flip the card over, and take a look at the back, it all looks to be well secured with plenty of screws to hold the cooler and heat spreaders in place. One thing however, which does seem strange if you aren’t too familiar with current and previous generation graphics cards, is that weird accumulation of solder in the top left corner of the image. Do you see where I was headed with my opening paragraph of this review now? If you’re still a little unsure, fear not. All will be revealed very shortly. Oh, and just for good measure, your card will not come with that pink “NOT FOR RESALE” sticker, in case you were curious.
It is revealing time! In order to power this card, you need both a six and eight pin PCIe power connector. What is strange and immediately obvious that this is nothing more than a faster clocked GTX 680 has for power ports. Do you remember how on the GTX 680s, the reference ones, how the power ports were stacked rather than side by side? Well, it’s no different on this card. I did expect to see them side by side but I cannot fault them for using this design as I do think it makes cable management both a little easier and it looks better too. That’s just my opinion though, plenty of other people may disagree. It had just become the norm for GPU power to be in a side-by-side position rather than the stacked config which is present on the reference GTX 680 and this GTX 770 from ZOTAC.
On the back of the card we have its outputs which consist of a single DVI-D and DVI-I port, a HDMI port and a DisplayPort to finish it all off.
