ZOTAC GeForce GTX 1080 Ti AMP Extreme review - Introduction

ZOTAC GeForce GTX 1080 Ti AMP Extreme
The most heavy duty and tweaked one of them all?

We review another flagship graphics card, this time it's ZOTAC in da house with their massive GeForce GTX 1080 Ti AMP Extreme. This GTX 1080 Ti comes customized with an impressive cooler, RGB LEDs... it is dressed to impress.

Yes, in this article we'll look at the fastest graphics card your money can get you, the Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 Ti based on Pascal architecture. Armed with 11GB of GDDR5X graphics memory and an all new GP102-350 GPU, we are certain we're gonna break some records today. It has been eight months since Nvidia released the first GP102 based product, the Titan X. To date, a hugely impressive graphics card that will resemble what we review today and very similar on a lot of levels. Really, the 1080 Ti is the Titan X, just with one GB of that GDDR5X memory less and the one ROP partition tied to it. So let me break it down swiftly and quickly; the new high-end GTX 1080 Ti features 3584 CUDA Cores, 224 Texture Units, a 352-bit memory controller and 11 GB of faster (11 Gbps) GDDR5X memory. The card has the same "GP102" GPU as the TITAN X Pascal, but the GTX 1080 Ti was slightly reconfigured. Most interesting is the 352-bit wide GDDR5X memory interface, this was not expected. This translates into 11 memory chips on the card which run at 11 GHz (GDDR5X-effective), the memory bandwidth is 484 GB/s. This invokes the change in ROP count to 88 (from 96 on the TITAN X Pascal), and the TMU count of 224. The Pascal based unit is a bit of a beast alright, the GPU die size is 471 sq mm. If you look at the wider product stack, then a GeForce GTX 1080 has 2,560 shader processors, the GeForce GTX 1070 has 1,920 shader processors, the GeForce GTX 1060 has 1,280 of them. The Nvidia GeForce 1080 Ti has 3,584 shader processors active inside that GP102 GPU, I say active here deliberately as it still isn't even a fully enabled GPU. This means it is has 28 SMs active (28 streaming multi-processors x 128 shader cores (2x64). The cards will be equipped with fast GDDR5X memory as well for this 11 GB model. That memory is tied to a 352-bit wide bus locked in at 11 GHz (GDDR5X-effective). The combination of that memory type and clock frequency gives the 1080 Ti an effective memory bandwidth of 484 GB/s. 

ZOTAC once again is back in the house to offer you the rather quiet yet massive (in size) product with the usual AMP looks to go with it of course.  

Basically you can look at AMP Extreme as their premium brand graphics card series and that invokes improvements on all design fronts and, as such, you will see a product today that has been overhauled and designed all custom with 16+2 (!) power phases, a serious IceStorm fan cooling system, factory tweaked clock speeds, Metallic ExoArmor with wraparound backplate and sure, configurable RGB LED lit activities up top and at the frontside. It is all rather impressive as this Pascal 102 GPU empowered product keeps that unit at, or just under, the 66 Degrees C marker depending on game load.

The AMP Extreme has three DP, then one HDMI connector and even a DVI connector. It, however, shines bright on its clock frequencies.

• Base clock: 1,645 MHz
• Turbo clock: 1,759 MHz
• Memory clock: 1400 MHz = 11,200 MHz effective data-rate