[section_title title=”Closer Look”]Closer Look
The ZOTAC GTX 970 AMP! Omega edition sports a completely redesigned cooler to what the AMP! Edition cards had with the 6xx/7xx series NVIDIA cards. With the previous revision having very vibrant orange fan blades, the new revision of the AMP! based cooler features black fans with ZOTAC written across the middle of them.
Aside from this, the Omega edition does feature some of that ZOTAC orangey goodness in the way of stripes going diagonally across the cooler; I do quite like this.
If gunmetal grey is your favourite colour then this card will certainly take your fancy as in my opinion, the finish is drop dead gorgeous.
Unlike the previous card we reviewed (The MSI GTX 970 Gaming), the Omega comes with a pre-installed back plate which will certainly give more favour to the ZOTAC card in terms of overall package appeal; a back plate will look so much better than bare PCB inside a case.
The ZOTAC features Japanese capacitors and as you can see on the back, the “power boost” chips on the back look very high end but I would have thought black screws would have been a better touch than silver; just my opinion though.
As previously mentioned, this card features a triple slot cooler design which will initially put some consumers off as the likelihood it will cover a pre-existing PCI slot is highly likely which could cause some issues. On the flip side the ZOTAC AMP! Omega edition cooler should provide top notch temperatures and cooling performance; if it doesn’t then there could be problems.
Sandwiched between the cooler shroud and the PCB we have the dual heat sink design ZOTAC have implemented with this card. This is helped via nickel plated heat pipes which transfer and dissipate heat efficiently; we hope so anyway.
The OC+ chip looks good right but is that going to make any difference in overclocking performance of this card? Maxwell potential is higher than ever before for those chasing high clocks and with uprated components from ZOTAC.
Speaking of overclocks, the AMP! Omega edition card comes with a pre clocked boost of 1241MHz and 1762MHz on the memory which is a very good overclock out of the box. The memory on this particular card hails from Samsung and not Hynix like MSI use. The GTX 970 as a reference point uses 4GB GDDR5 memory over a 256bit bus.
With the NVIDIA Maxwell based GTX 970 only having a TDP of 145watts, I really do fail to see why the use of 2 x 8pin connectors was necessary other than for pure overclocking potential. Maxwell isn’t that hot due to the lower power consumption so I also question ZOTAC on the use of a triple slot cooler; unless thermal performance is chart topping this could be a disadvantage rather than an advantage. In terms of length, the ZOTAC GTX 970 AMP! Omega Edition is just shy of 11” long which will surely fit in the majority of ATX rated cases and with M-ITX cases becoming slightly larger, even those.
Last but not least we have the rear I/O which features 1 x DVI port, 3 x full size DisplayPort inputs and 1 x HDMI. It is worth pointing out that via DVI, you can only get a maximum resolution of 2560×1600 and the HDMI/DisplayPort both support 4K HD resolutions. I do however feel they could have included a DisplayPort adapter in the box as if you intend to use multi-monitor setups via DVI; this won’t be possible without at least 1 type of adapter.
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