ZOTAC GTX 980 AMP! Extreme Edition 4GB Review

[section_title title=”Conclusion”]Conclusion

It would be a mistake to say that the NVIDIA GTX 980 hasn’t been the talking point of enthusiasts for the past month or so since its release but with the GTX 970 coming in at a lower price, is there as much of a gap as the money required makes out?  ZOTAC have put a lot of effort into their new AMP! range with newly designed coolers to compliment the latest NVIDIA Maxwell chipset but are they impressive enough to score any awards today?  Let’s find out…

Performance is brilliant but when compared to the GTX 970 which is the model below the GTX 980, the performance jump isn’t as much as I would have thought it to be.  The biggest jump in terms of performance is during synthetic benchmarks but when transferred into actual game performance, the gap diminishes into nothing more than subjective numbers.  It’s only when we enter the realm of the 1440p resolution that the GTX 980 really shows its weight; 1080p gaming is becoming less intensive across the board and this is the first card we have officially tested at 1440p.  Overclocking performance wasn’t great and the results are very subjective, sometimes negative which isn’t a good sign but overall, the AMP! Extreme comes with a monstrous overclock out of the box so ZOTAC can be forgiven this time round.  If I had to sum up the performance, I would say ZOTAC do have a winner and this card is undoubtedly better than anything currently on the market but I was expecting more and I can’t hide my disappointment here.  It’s also worth noting that this is the only card to come out with 60+ FPS on Battlefield 4 @ 1440p which shows the true potential of this card; even if it was overclocked.

The design of the card when compared to the previous ZOTAC card I reviewed (GTX 970 AMP! Omega edition), is much better and if the Omega would have had these aesthetics, then it would have been a contender for our design award.  Dual slot coolers are a lot more functional than triple slot and it’s nice to see the Extreme sporting one; Maxwell doesn’t run too hot anyway so nothing substantial is actually needed.  With this card having LED lights, my first reaction was positive but given that I couldn’t control the colour, I was stuck with red.  Now this isn’t a problem if you have a red themed system or even like the colour, but when booting the system up the glow was green and I much preferred this colour; green is good.  What I am trying to say is those who want to match LED colours up to those already in their system might not feel this card to be suitable as the LEDs are very bling bling and bright.  This is of course subjective and my own personal opinion but after using the card for over a week, I lost interest in the LED lighting very quickly.

Price wise, the ZOTAC GTX 980 AMP! Extreme Edition graphics card comes in at £489.99 at Ebuyer and although it isn’t the most expensive on the market, it’s far from the cheapest.  With price here you really need to consider a few factors; one being the huge out of the box overclock and secondly the cooler performance.  With both being exceptional, I could recommend this card to anyone looking for a Maxwell GTX 980 variant who wants the best out of the box performance.  It would have been nice to see a more inclusive bundle included and perhaps another DVI port, but I guess that wasn’t meant to be.

To sum it up, the ZOTAC GTX 980 AMP! Extreme edition card does offer top of the range performance with a nice feature set including ZOTAC FireStorm, NVIDIA DSR and of course a huge 4GB of VRAM for those high resolutions.  Aside from the slightly higher price tag than a few other premium models, this card with a little price drop could be a top contender and even with that aside, it sits firmly top of performance (for now).

Huge thanks to ZOTAC for sending the card in for review and I look forward to seeing more in the future.