ZOTAC GTX 980 AMP! Extreme Edition 4GB Review

[section_title title=”Closer Look”]Closer Look

For ZOTACs top of the range Maxwell card (currently), the extreme edition comes in a black box with an AMP! Extreme edition branded sleeve.  There is no actual illustration of the card on the front, but it does contain information which includes the use of 4GB of GDDR5 VRAM and the family it belongs to; the NVIDIA GTX 980 range.

Inside of the box aside from the Extreme edition GTX 980, we have a VGA to DVI adapter, USB cable for ZOTAC FireStorm, 2 x power cables for your power supply (providing you don’t have enough 8pin connectors on it) and a sleeve which contains an instruction manual and driver installation disk; that stuff is pretty standard nowadays but I would still recommend downloading the latest graphics drivers direct from the NVIDIA website.

Taking our first look at the ZOTAC GTX 980 AMP! Extreme edition graphics card, it has a very nice snake skin like carbon effect across the main body of the cooler, with a solid black around the shroud to add a lovely contrast.  In terms of aesthetics, this card at first glance is one of the best looking on the market and unlike the GTX 970 AMP! Omega cooler, this is only a dual slot cooler; much better from ZOTAC this time round.

Specs wise, the extreme edition comes with stock clocks of 1291MHz with a memory clock of 1800MHz; one of the fastest cards at stock in terms of GTX 980’s.  This is complimented by a 2048 shader count with 4GB of GDDR5 VRAM across a 256bit bus; meaning this card should be mustard.

The cooler utilises 3 x cooling fans which help dissipate heat from the heat sink, thus providing sufficient and effective cooling of the GTX 980 Maxwell GPU core.

This particular model features a back plate which features the same carbon effect as the majority of the front of the card does; a very nice touch and the PCB features the same “Power Boost” components as the previously ZOTAC GTX 970 we reviewed.  In the bottom left hand corner, there is the OC+ chip which should provide more overclocking potential than a reference card, but also provide assistance to ZOTACs FireStorm overclocking utility as this card comes with a USB cable for direct connection to your motherboard; a nifty feature.

In terms of size, the ZOTAC GTX 980 Extreme is classified as a dual slot cooler and 12” in length; certainly not a small card but not the largest by any figment of the imagination.

Featuring a 209watt TDP, the ZOTAC GTX 980 AMP! Extreme edition requires 2 x 8pin power connectors to power this card up.  This could be considered overkill but given the “extreme” nature of this card and of course NVIDIAs claim that the GTX 980 is the most powerful gaming card on earth, it’s no surprise to see 2 x 8pin connectors.  The recommended power supply for this card single GPU configuration is 500w; a nice surprise as an R9 290X requires around a 600w power supply.

Like the ZOTAC GTX 970 AMP! Omega edition, this card only has 1 x DVI port which is a little disappointing.  There is however 3 x DisplayPort and 1 x HDMI connection although it would have been nice to see a DVI to HDMI adapter included in the box as I’m sure anyone buying a £500 GPU will of course have a monitor that supports DVI; no need for the VGA adapter but they can come in handy.

Overall the ZOTAC GTX 980 AMP! Extreme edition card does have a very nice aesthetic and I really do applaud the decision to use a dual slot cooler instead of a triple slot; it allows more room for expansion in your system if you need it.  Let’s take a look at the most important part, the performance and see if this card is the bee’s knees…