ZOTAC GeForce GTX 1080 AMP! Extreme review - Introduction

ZOTAC GeForce GTX 1080 AMP! Extreme Edition
The GTX 1080 in an industrial style

We move on-wards to the next 1080 review, meet the all custom, cooled and tweaked higher ZOTAC GeForce GTX 1080 AMP! Extreme Edition. Let's check out the new 8 GB beast with that massive three slot cooler, extra RGB LED functionality and very hip'n trendy clock frequencies. The GPU industry has been on hold, waiting for a smaller GPU fabrication process to become viable. Last generation GPUs were based on a 28 nm fabrication, an intermediate move to 20 nm was supposed to be the answer for today’s GPUs, but it was a problematic technology. Aside from some smaller ASICs the 20 nm node has been a fail. Therefore the industry had to wait until an ever newer and smaller fabrication process was available in order to shrink the die which allows for less voltage usage in the chips, less transistor gate leakage and, obviously, more transistors in a GPU. The answer was to be found in the recent 14/15/16 nm fabrication processors and processes with the now all too familiar FinFET + VLSI technology (basically wings on a transistor). Intel has been using it for a while, and now both Nvidia and AMD are moving towards such nodes as well. Nvidia is the first to announce their new products based on a TSMC 16 nm process fab by introducing Pascal GPU architecture, named after the mathematician much like Kepler, Maxwell and Fermi. That stage has now passed, the GeForce GTX 1070 and 1080 have been announced with the 1070 and 1080 cards slowly becoming available in stores as we speak. Both models are equally impressive in its product positioning, though I do feel the 1070 will be the more attractive product due to its price level, the 1080 cards really is what everybody want (but perhaps can't afford). The good news though is that the board partner cards will offer SKUs for less opposed to the Nvidia reference / Founder edition cards. Obviously the higher-end all customized SKUs will likely level with that founders edition card price level again, but I am pretty certain you'd rather spend your money on a fully customized AIB card that is already factory tweaked a bit opposed the the reference one. So merely a few weeks after launch, I think this is our 6th Geforce GTX 1080 review already ? 

Today we test the ZOTAC GeForce GTX 1080 AMP! Extreme Edition model. A product with a massive cooler, very higher clock speeds and a backplate with LED lit logo. The graphics card has pretty significant clock frequencies of 1911 MHz (boost) / 1772 (base) MHz. The GDDR5X memory has been tweaked as well as it is running 10.8 GHz (effective data-rate). The ZOTAC GeForce GTX 1080 AMP! Extreme has a triple-slot design with triple-fan cooling solution, and dual 8-pin PCIe power connectors, and a nice factory-overclock. The ZOTAC GTX 1080 cards feature the following: IceStorm Fans with ExoArmor, PowerBoost, FREEZE and Spectra LED lighting. Right, we have enough to talk about and to show, let's head on-wards in the review. But first let me allow you a sneek peek at da AMP! Extreme.