ZOTAC GAMING GeForce RTX 2080 Ti AMP Extreme review - Introduction

ZOTAC GAMING GeForce RTX 2080 Ti AMP Extreme edition
A wolf in sheep clothing ?... 

In this review, we look at the top SKU Zotac GeForce RTX 2080 Ti, in specific the ZOTAC GAMING GeForce RTX 2080 Ti AMP Extreme edition. This product has been fitted with a massive cooler, not just that it's been factory tweaked towards pretty amped up levels as well.

In the past two months we talked and debated a lot about new technology as the Turing architecture of the new GPUs offers a fundament change in the graphics card arena as next to your normal shading engine, NVIDIA has added RT (Raytracing) cores, as well as Tensor (AI), cores onto the new GPUs, and these are active. Is Turing is the start of the next 20 years of gaming graphics? Well, that all depends on the actual adoption rate in the software houses as well as the success of the hardware offered. In this article, we'll quickly recap a bit of architecture and then we'll dive into real-world testing of course. You better grab a drink as these reference articles are prone to be lengthy with all the information we are covering. 

The GeForce RTX 2080 Ti - this is the new consumer flagship graphics card from NVIDIA is the GeForce RTX 2080 Ti, this product series has been fitted with the TU102 GPU. This GPU will have 4352 active shader processors, which is substantial when compared with the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti. The product will get 11GB GDDR6 graphics memory, and with that 11 GB, you will get a 352-bit wide memory bus. The GPU has six Graphics Processing Clusters (GPCs), 36 Texture Processing Clusters (TPCs), and 72 Streaming Multiprocessors (SMs). Each SM contains 64 CUDA Cores, eight Tensor Cores, four texture units, and 96 KB of L1/shared memory which can be configured for various capacities depending on the compute or graphics workloads. Ray tracing acceleration is performed by a new RT Core processing, the TU102 has 72 of them with 576 tensor cores and 96 ROP units. For clock frequencies, we're looking at a 1350 MHz base frequency, with Turbo allowance towards 1635 MHz. Keep some margin in mind for the board partner clock frequencies. The AIB products should start at 999 USD, the founders' edition will start at 1199 USD. The reality, however, is that the AIB products also sit in that 1199 USD price bracket.

ZOTAC now offers their GAMING GeForce RTX 2080 Ti AMP Extreme which has been fitted with that Turing TU102 based GPU and is a product series that is released to replace the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti. The graphics card is all customized and was fitted with the latest model AMP cooler. Much like many premium graphics cards up-to 55 Degrees C the card will passive mode, e.g. the fans will not spin. The cooler is embedded with a side RGB LED logo which can be color controlled and animated. You will spot two power connectors (8-pin) and at the backside, you'll find a matte black backplate. The RTX 2080 Ti AMP Extreme has a significantly increased clock frequency that can boost towards 1815 MHz. The graphics memory as well has been tweaked, (11GB GDDR6 / 14.4 GHz effective data-rate). We'll start with a product overview in the photo-shoot, but have a quick peek first. Have a peek and then lets dive deep into this review.