ZOTAC GeForce GTX 1080 AMP! Extreme review - Product Showcase

Product Showcase

Let's start with our photo-shoot. A few pages that show the ins and outs with photos, all taken with an in-house photo-shoot of course.
  

So the AMP! Extreme is the most high-end SKU that Zotac delivers. Zotac moved away from the reference design and merely use a Pascal GPU. You will spot a nice matte black PCB with 10-phases (8+2) and two power headers (both 8-pin) for a little more overclocking headroom. 

As board partners are allowed to release the 1080 model cards in their own configurations you will see many versions, mostly based on customized PCB/component and the obviously mandatory different cooling solutions. The card is one of the fastest out of the box with a boost clock of 1911 MHz. The PCB is as mentioned matte black in color, and of course the new revision cooler is being used, it is called CARBON EXOARMOR and despite the mention of carbon is a metal wraparound backplate and metal front shroud.

The card itself is a massive triple-slot solution, it is composite heat-pipe based, the GPU is cooled by a nickel-plated copper base plate connected heat pipes (6 heatpipes (4x 8mm + 2x 6mm). In low-load situations fans are not needed thus up-to roughly 60 Degrees C, the fans won't even spin. The LEDs embedded in this graphics card can be controlled with a Zotac APP.  Check out the backside where there is a thick sturdy metal back-plate with plenty of venting spaces applied as well. The logo to the left side and and top sides have LEDs activated. For me personally it's a bit too much and very busy on the eyes. 

The card has a power design of roughly 180 Watts, but due to the high clocks and extensive tweaking design please add 15~20 extra Watts.  The GeForce GTX 1080 is DisplayPort 1.2 certified and DP 1.3/1.4 Ready, enabling support for 4K displays at 120Hz, 5K displays at 60Hz, and 8K displays at 60Hz (using two cables). This model includes three DisplayPort connectors, one HDMI 2.0b connector, and one dual-link DVI connector. Up to four display heads can be driven simultaneously from one card. The GTX 1080 display pipeline supports HDR gaming, as well as video encoding and decoding. New to Pascal is HDR Video (4K@60 10/12b HEVC Decode), HDR Record/Stream (4K@60 10b HEVC Encode), and HDR Interface Support (DP 1.4).