Verdict and Conclusion
Zotac being one of Nvidia’s main board partners, have always produced great graphic cards that come pre-overclocked. This means that their cards run faster than most, resulting in excellent performance when compared against their competitors. In order to do this successfully, you need a powerful cooling system, and Zotac has got the answer with their Ice-Storm cooling system and EKO fans.
Right now, Nvidia has won the battle of 2016 (against AMD/Radeon) for producing the world’s fastest GPUs. This is all thanks to a super-fast, but very efficient GPU utilizing the 16nm FinFET process and Pascal architecture. Furthermore, with Zotac’s pre-overclocked graphic cards, the AMP Extreme is a very powerful performer indeed. Not even the Founder’s Edition can touch it. It’s definitely the fastest GTX 1080 yet!
During my benchmarks, I got good scores for 3DMark 11, 3DMark Firestrike and Monster Hunter Online, which is DX11 based. For DX12 benchmark I used 3DMark Time Spy and DOOM. Both produced great scores. Remember, I ran this card at default settings (which is already pre-overlocked at 1771MHz. Standard clock rate is 1607MHz), I’ve yet to overclocked it with the Firestorm software, which should take me past 2000MHz!
Update: We’re updated our test rig, which now consists of an ASRock X99 motherboard, along with an Intel Core i7-6800K Broadwell processor and 32GB of ADATA DDR4-2400 ram in quad channel mode.
It will be interesting to see how this card will perform against other GTX 1080’s on the market. And I would love to compare its performance in SLI mode vs the recently announced Nvidia TITAN X, which they claim to be THE world’s fastest graphics card and with a nice catchphrase too!… “Irresponsible Amount of Performance”… Hahaha!
Pricewise, the Zotac GeForce GTX 1080 AMP Extreme Edition will cost you a staggering USD $870-899, which is pretty high right now. But you do get a better cooler and it comes pre-overclocked. Is it worth the price? … I’ll let you decide. In comparison, the Founder’s Edition costs a mere USD $699. Buy now at Amazon – http://goo.gl/dbzprq
Pros:
- Great performance
- VR-Ready
- Pre-overclocked at 1771MHz
- Can be overclocked further to 1911MHz or higher
- FireStorm application for tuning and overclocking
- 2560 CUDA cores
- 8GB of GDDR5X video memory
- 256-bit memory bus
- Spectra lighting system
- EKO fans and Ice-Storm cooling
- Exoarmor backplate
Cons:
- Price
- Weight
Final Words:
To put it simply, the Zotac GeForce GTX 1080 AMP Extreme Edition is currently the world’s fastest GTX 1080. The pre-overclocked GPU really makes all the difference, producing the best score I’ve seen to date in all of our benchmarks. You also get a very powerful cooler with 6 heatpipes , along with some very quiet EKO fans. If you’re hardcore gamer with a fat wallet, go get yourself one of these … you won’t be disappointed. For the rest of us, we can only dream 😉
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5 comments
A big thank for this very useful review. I have just buy this BIG card and waiting for her. For information can you tell me wath is the thickness of the thermal pads. Thanks.
“It will be interesting to see how this card (or any other GTX 1080) will perform, when compared against the AMD Radeon RX480”
Is this a joke??? Everybody knows that the 480 is 2 levels behind this card…2×480 won’t even match a 1080.
[censored]
Yup, this is not the end of the end of the review. We’ll be testing the Zotac GeForce GTX 1080 AMP Extreme Edition against other GTX 1080 as well. Plus we will revisit the benchmarks as soon as we have a better OC’ing setup.
Doom uses OpenGL or Vulkan, not DX12 as you put in the benchmark image.
Let me amend it. Thanks for the info.