Zotac GTX 970 AMP! Extreme Review: Fastest GTX 970 that we've tested so far!

Zotac GTX 970 AMP! Extreme detailed review

Last month we saw the flagship card from ZOTAC which happened to be the 980 AMP! Extreme. This here follows in the same steps as the 980 i.e. there are three custom SKUs and this particular SKU is the best among all of them. A stock 970 has a base clock of 1050 MHz and the ZOTAC GTX 970 AMP! Extreme has a base clock of 1203MHz which is quite  substantial. So feature wise the 980 and the 970 are pretty much the same other than the GPU, of course. We’ve covered all of these features last month so you can check out that review for all the details which include the Exo Armour, Light.Id and the OC Plus GPU tweaking and monitoring software. As was with the GTX 980, the Exo Armour takes up three slots but the cooling is efficient thanks to the 3 fans.

When it comes to performance we’ve only been able to compare it to the ASUS Strix 970 and in all gaming benchmarks this card is ahead by 2-9 FPS but OpenCL compute  performance is where the difference becomes really prominent with scores exceeding that of the ASUS Strix 970 by about 110 points. The price difference between the ASUS card and the ZOTAC card pays off if you make use of OC Plus to its full potential. We’ve heard rumours of the GTX 960 being prepped for launch which should provide better value than all 970s.

Specifications

Chipset: GM204
Base clock: 1203MHz
Memory clock - 1800MHz
CUDA cores - 1664
Texture Units: 104
ROPs: 64
Manufacturing process: 28nm, PCIe 3.0, 4096 x 2160 digital resolution support, 4 GB Memory
DirectX support - 12
OpenGL support: 4.4
Power Connectors: 8Pin + 8Pin
TDP: 145+W
Warranty: 5 years