The Zotac 1080 Amp Extreme Card: A Review of Its Performance and Overclocking Potential

As I sat down to review the Zotac 1080 Amp Extreme card, I couldn't help but feel a sense of excitement and anticipation. This card is touted as one of the fastest consumer-grade 1080 cards on the market, with a boost clock speed of 1911 MHz out of the box. But how does it perform in real-world applications, and can it maintain its impressive speeds under stress testing?

In terms of cooling, the Zotac 1080 Amp Extreme card is equipped with an extremely large cooler, which is roughly the size of Manhattan. This massive heat sink suggests that the card is designed to handle high temperatures, but I was eager to see how it would perform in practice. As I began my stress testing, I noticed that the fan curve on this card is actually very noise-friendly, where you're never going to hear the fans on this ever - even at high temperatures.

However, as I delved deeper into the review, I discovered that while the card can achieve impressive speeds out of the box, it falls short when trying to push its limits further. In my stress testing, I was able to get a boost clock speed of 2050 MHz, which is an astonishing 139 MHz faster than the advertised 1911 MHz boost speed. However, even with this significant boost, I found that achieving a stable 2100 MHz overclock proved to be challenging.

In fact, even without touching the temperature limits or tweaking the fan settings, I was able to get artifacting on the screen at 2100 MHz with VSync and G-Sync off. This suggests that the card's memory is running at an incredibly high speed of around 10,940 MHz, which is not unusual for consumer-grade cards. However, this also means that pushing the card further requires careful management of the memory settings to avoid artifacts.

One area where the Zotac 1080 Amp Extreme card excels is in its boost clock performance. Out of the box, it achieves speeds that I've seen on few other cards. As an overclocker, however, I was hoping for more. While the card's boost clock speed is impressive, I found that achieving a stable 2100 MHz overclock proved to be elusive.

In fact, even with my own Founders Edition card, which has proven to be one of the most consistent and reliable cards in my testing, I found it challenging to achieve a stable 2100 MHz overclock. However, when I applied water cooling to the card, things changed dramatically. With a boost clock speed of around 2166 MHz, this card proved to be a beast that could handle even the most demanding workloads.

In conclusion, while the Zotac 1080 Amp Extreme card is an impressive performer out of the box, its overclocking potential leaves much to be desired. As an overclocker, I was hoping for more from this card, and unfortunately, it failed to deliver in my testing. However, if you're a gamer who wants a fast card that can handle demanding games without breaking the bank, then the Zotac 1080 Amp Extreme card is certainly worth considering.

But for those of us who are die-hard overclockers, the Zotac 1080 Amp Extreme card serves as a reminder that silicon lottery plays a significant role in determining a card's performance. While this card may be able to achieve impressive speeds out of the box, its performance is ultimately limited by the random variations in its internal components. As such, even the most well-designed cards can fall victim to the whims of fate, making overclocking a high-risk, high-reward endeavor.

As I wrap up my review of the Zotac 1080 Amp Extreme card, I'm left with mixed feelings about this product. On the one hand, it's an impressive performer that can handle demanding games with ease. However, its overclocking potential leaves much to be desired, and as such, it may not be the best choice for those who are seeking a card that can push its limits even further.

But if you're looking for a fast card that can deliver excellent performance without breaking the bank, then the Zotac 1080 Amp Extreme card is certainly worth considering. Just be aware of the potential risks involved in overclocking and the role that silicon lottery plays in determining a card's performance.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhey what's up guys js2 sense here and trust me when I say that there are very few times in life where size truly matters trust me I would know but don't tell that to Zotac because with their new GTX 1080 amp extreme they obviously let the extreme stand for its size because behind this is a standard Founders Edition card which has never actually looked so little and puny until now I mean look at this this is this is this is crazy the new z170 classified motherboard from EVGA features 8-phase pwm four-way SLI support along with top-notch components to offer Gamers and enthusiasts more of what they want a badass motherboard with no compromises click the link below to learn more all right now I don't want to spend a lot of time going over the specs that we already know this is like the 6th 1080 review we've done it's the same 16 nanometer gp106 finfet Pascal core 256bit memory bus 8 GB of g5x the memory out of the box on here is actually overclocked uh 2560 cacor and it's got a boost clock of 1911 MHz so out of the box the base clock on this card is faster than the Boost clock on the founders Edition obviously this one is much much bigger it's got two 8 Pin power connectors on here 270 wat TDP on this card so obviously that's up almost 100 Watts from the standard Founders Edition allowing it to pull a lot of power to try and get the best overclocking out of the box um but we'll talk about that in a minute trust me overclocking was something I really wanted to spend with our time with on this card uh but it's got its ice storm triple fan design here it's got massive heat pipes on here running the length of the card the card measures about a foot long it's a really really long card and it's a triple slot card so you're going to want to keep that in mind that small form factor builds this is not exactly a small form factor card now just like the other amp cards in the past it's got this very um really kind of a in-your-face gunmetal and yellow design which actually fit perfectly in the Sim rig cuz I've got a black and yellow theme going on in there um but it's got this this light on the back here that says push the limit and unfortunately I agree with some folks that this kind of looks gy I think this takes away from the whole appeal of the card it's not a sticker that you can just peel off you got to keep that in mind this card right here is humongous now kind of keeping in Tradition with the other 1080s we've seen this does not have a multiple bio selection on it which is kind of interesting because with the 980 TI we saw lots of graphics cards had bio selector switches for higher voltages and more overclocking options more fan options um but so far none of the 10es I've taken a look at actually have that feature and I'm wondering if that has something to do with the core or Nvidia is getting involved with that so on the front of the card here um these do light up white the Zotac logo here lights up white um and this actually pushes a lot of light down in your case so when it's facing like this um you are going to see the lit Zotac right here and this is going to push a lot of light down so it's going to light what's underneath the card pretty nicely um but with that said let's go ahead and talk about the things you guys want to know how does it perform um well let's go ahead and find out right now transition okay so before we jump into the benchmarks I know I just told you we were going to do that but then we didn't do that um I wanted to point out obviously as you can see the LEDs in the front right now are not white and that's because uh I didn't realize that if you downloaded The Firestorm app uh it was actually a an LED uh that's changeable colors in there now it's not true RGB because you can't choose from the 18 million color spectrum on there it's just selectable lighting colors there's like seven colors that you can choose from you can change the lighting including that silly push the limits logo on the back plate uh to change the color to be whatever you want but although it's a gunmetal and yellow back plate it's going to look good in a black and yellow build kind of like the old Skunk Works or like a bumblebee theme or even like a Fallout 4 theme or something like that would look really really good with this card um but then again you know I've always wondered what the point of RGB is or or color selectable LEDs when the card already has its own color theme anyway I digress again let's go ahead and jump into those benchmarks transition okay holy hell if this isn't like the Ron Jeremy of 108s oh my God it is freaking the okay fortunately in the in your endos are going to continue on this because let's just face it there's some huge material to work with yeah that was cringeworthy but I move on and I digress that this is the fastest 1080 out of the box that I've had come through the channel yet um I've already checked out several of these cards custom pcbs Founders editions and out of the box this thing boosted all the way up to 250 MHz on its own without touching anything no no additional fan curve no additional power limit no additional temp limit and that 270 W TDP is at the 100% power power limit on there which they allow you to go to 120% which means you could do a lot of power draw on this card um with the two 8 Pin connectors on there but yeah it boosted all the way up to 2050 and the crazy thing about that is the fan curve on this with the three fans and its custom fan design and the massive heat pipes on this and just the boohemoth of a cooler kept this thing under 66c the entire time and what's kind of funny about that is that's right on the threshold of where the fans turn on and on this card here it's the only card I've seen that's come through this channel yet that's been able to turn the fan on in the middle of the test and cool itself off enough to turn off again during the stress test now yeah it turns back on pretty quickly but it actually will go on off on off while stress testing and I've never had a cooler that's been good enough yet on ay to manage to do that but the fan curve on this is actually very very noise friendly where you're never going to hear the fans on this ever and that's without even touching touching temp limits and stuff you play with the fan cre even a little bit you can get a lot of additional boost out of this but 2050 in my scenario here that's 139 MHz faster than the advertised 1911 boost speed so out of the box this is the fastest 1080 I've looked at yet but see like I said the the in your endos continue unfortunately even though it has a dual 8 Pin power plug design 270 W TDP 8 plus2 power phase and a massive cooler the size of Manhattan I cannot achieve a stable 2100 MHz overclock on that that's that's only 50 MHz faster than it boosted up to on its own although that'd be 139 MHz faster than its boost clock of 1911 on the box uh yeah 1080s just that that seems to be a magical number 21100 and above is not easy for them to achieve ironically the only cards I have that can continuously hit 2100 and be stable are my Founders edition cards which have left a lot of people wondering if Nvidia maybe was handpicking these cores and hanging on to them for the founders Edition all three of my Founders edition cards can achieve 2100 or more this exact one I'm holding my hand could hit 2136 the one I already put the water block on can hit 2166 MHz on air I haven't even tested on water yet um yeah so again single eight pin power and standard uh Power phase design these are going farther than all of these custom cards now that said it is the farthest boosting Bo card out of the box yet these didn't boost this far so if you're the kind of person that wants to get a massive card and just put it in and know I'm you're getting you're going to get over 2,000 MHz guaranteed then it's it is a fantastic card it really is um as an overclocking Enthusiast myself I was hoping with all this extra extreme power and stuff that it would get me 2100 and higher 2150 or maybe even like the Unicorn 2200 not even close unfortunately at 2100 I started seeing black artifact artifacting on the screen without even touching the memory cuz again the memory runs at just under 11,000 on its own it's like 2480 so it's like 10,940 or 960 so it's really fast memory out of the box I didn't even touch that um yeah I was getting artifacting at 2100 with vsync or g-sync off of course when when g-sync and vsync is on the megahertz can ramp up the core isn't under as much load and it can actually stay stable but the problem is once you let the FPS run away and go to its Max generated FPS um something happens in the calculations and then the core just falls on its face at the same speed it's stable at with vnon um but if you're a DI hard overclocker again silicon Lottery is going to make the biggest impact on how far your card is going to overclock there's no way of knowing what's going to happen until you get out and try it so there you go guys the Zotac 1080 amp extreme card the fastest boost clock out of the box that I've tested yet um if you're a dieh hard overclocker remember silicon Lottery matters more than anything that you put on the card and there's no way of knowing how well that card is going to perform uh until you get it and check it out you might get a a unicorn you might get a dud again that's why it's called the Silicon Lottery tell me what you guys think down in the comments about this card I find a lot of people love it and a lot of people hate it not many people in the middle ground and it all comes down to the styling The Styling on this is really kind of in your face some people like that and some don't you guys tell me do you like it and what other cards do you guys want me to check out because I'm going to uh kind of cut off the 1080 reviews here pretty soon I don't want to do too many 1080 reviews and obviously we've got the 1060 launching right around the corner and I want to look at some more 1070s with that said gu with that with that said guys I'm going to go ahead and get on out of here thanks for watching and I will see you guys in the next videohey what's up guys js2 sense here and trust me when I say that there are very few times in life where size truly matters trust me I would know but don't tell that to Zotac because with their new GTX 1080 amp extreme they obviously let the extreme stand for its size because behind this is a standard Founders Edition card which has never actually looked so little and puny until now I mean look at this this is this is this is crazy the new z170 classified motherboard from EVGA features 8-phase pwm four-way SLI support along with top-notch components to offer Gamers and enthusiasts more of what they want a badass motherboard with no compromises click the link below to learn more all right now I don't want to spend a lot of time going over the specs that we already know this is like the 6th 1080 review we've done it's the same 16 nanometer gp106 finfet Pascal core 256bit memory bus 8 GB of g5x the memory out of the box on here is actually overclocked uh 2560 cacor and it's got a boost clock of 1911 MHz so out of the box the base clock on this card is faster than the Boost clock on the founders Edition obviously this one is much much bigger it's got two 8 Pin power connectors on here 270 wat TDP on this card so obviously that's up almost 100 Watts from the standard Founders Edition allowing it to pull a lot of power to try and get the best overclocking out of the box um but we'll talk about that in a minute trust me overclocking was something I really wanted to spend with our time with on this card uh but it's got its ice storm triple fan design here it's got massive heat pipes on here running the length of the card the card measures about a foot long it's a really really long card and it's a triple slot card so you're going to want to keep that in mind that small form factor builds this is not exactly a small form factor card now just like the other amp cards in the past it's got this very um really kind of a in-your-face gunmetal and yellow design which actually fit perfectly in the Sim rig cuz I've got a black and yellow theme going on in there um but it's got this this light on the back here that says push the limit and unfortunately I agree with some folks that this kind of looks gy I think this takes away from the whole appeal of the card it's not a sticker that you can just peel off you got to keep that in mind this card right here is humongous now kind of keeping in Tradition with the other 1080s we've seen this does not have a multiple bio selection on it which is kind of interesting because with the 980 TI we saw lots of graphics cards had bio selector switches for higher voltages and more overclocking options more fan options um but so far none of the 10es I've taken a look at actually have that feature and I'm wondering if that has something to do with the core or Nvidia is getting involved with that so on the front of the card here um these do light up white the Zotac logo here lights up white um and this actually pushes a lot of light down in your case so when it's facing like this um you are going to see the lit Zotac right here and this is going to push a lot of light down so it's going to light what's underneath the card pretty nicely um but with that said let's go ahead and talk about the things you guys want to know how does it perform um well let's go ahead and find out right now transition okay so before we jump into the benchmarks I know I just told you we were going to do that but then we didn't do that um I wanted to point out obviously as you can see the LEDs in the front right now are not white and that's because uh I didn't realize that if you downloaded The Firestorm app uh it was actually a an LED uh that's changeable colors in there now it's not true RGB because you can't choose from the 18 million color spectrum on there it's just selectable lighting colors there's like seven colors that you can choose from you can change the lighting including that silly push the limits logo on the back plate uh to change the color to be whatever you want but although it's a gunmetal and yellow back plate it's going to look good in a black and yellow build kind of like the old Skunk Works or like a bumblebee theme or even like a Fallout 4 theme or something like that would look really really good with this card um but then again you know I've always wondered what the point of RGB is or or color selectable LEDs when the card already has its own color theme anyway I digress again let's go ahead and jump into those benchmarks transition okay holy hell if this isn't like the Ron Jeremy of 108s oh my God it is freaking the okay fortunately in the in your endos are going to continue on this because let's just face it there's some huge material to work with yeah that was cringeworthy but I move on and I digress that this is the fastest 1080 out of the box that I've had come through the channel yet um I've already checked out several of these cards custom pcbs Founders editions and out of the box this thing boosted all the way up to 250 MHz on its own without touching anything no no additional fan curve no additional power limit no additional temp limit and that 270 W TDP is at the 100% power power limit on there which they allow you to go to 120% which means you could do a lot of power draw on this card um with the two 8 Pin connectors on there but yeah it boosted all the way up to 2050 and the crazy thing about that is the fan curve on this with the three fans and its custom fan design and the massive heat pipes on this and just the boohemoth of a cooler kept this thing under 66c the entire time and what's kind of funny about that is that's right on the threshold of where the fans turn on and on this card here it's the only card I've seen that's come through this channel yet that's been able to turn the fan on in the middle of the test and cool itself off enough to turn off again during the stress test now yeah it turns back on pretty quickly but it actually will go on off on off while stress testing and I've never had a cooler that's been good enough yet on ay to manage to do that but the fan curve on this is actually very very noise friendly where you're never going to hear the fans on this ever and that's without even touching touching temp limits and stuff you play with the fan cre even a little bit you can get a lot of additional boost out of this but 2050 in my scenario here that's 139 MHz faster than the advertised 1911 boost speed so out of the box this is the fastest 1080 I've looked at yet but see like I said the the in your endos continue unfortunately even though it has a dual 8 Pin power plug design 270 W TDP 8 plus2 power phase and a massive cooler the size of Manhattan I cannot achieve a stable 2100 MHz overclock on that that's that's only 50 MHz faster than it boosted up to on its own although that'd be 139 MHz faster than its boost clock of 1911 on the box uh yeah 1080s just that that seems to be a magical number 21100 and above is not easy for them to achieve ironically the only cards I have that can continuously hit 2100 and be stable are my Founders edition cards which have left a lot of people wondering if Nvidia maybe was handpicking these cores and hanging on to them for the founders Edition all three of my Founders edition cards can achieve 2100 or more this exact one I'm holding my hand could hit 2136 the one I already put the water block on can hit 2166 MHz on air I haven't even tested on water yet um yeah so again single eight pin power and standard uh Power phase design these are going farther than all of these custom cards now that said it is the farthest boosting Bo card out of the box yet these didn't boost this far so if you're the kind of person that wants to get a massive card and just put it in and know I'm you're getting you're going to get over 2,000 MHz guaranteed then it's it is a fantastic card it really is um as an overclocking Enthusiast myself I was hoping with all this extra extreme power and stuff that it would get me 2100 and higher 2150 or maybe even like the Unicorn 2200 not even close unfortunately at 2100 I started seeing black artifact artifacting on the screen without even touching the memory cuz again the memory runs at just under 11,000 on its own it's like 2480 so it's like 10,940 or 960 so it's really fast memory out of the box I didn't even touch that um yeah I was getting artifacting at 2100 with vsync or g-sync off of course when when g-sync and vsync is on the megahertz can ramp up the core isn't under as much load and it can actually stay stable but the problem is once you let the FPS run away and go to its Max generated FPS um something happens in the calculations and then the core just falls on its face at the same speed it's stable at with vnon um but if you're a DI hard overclocker again silicon Lottery is going to make the biggest impact on how far your card is going to overclock there's no way of knowing what's going to happen until you get out and try it so there you go guys the Zotac 1080 amp extreme card the fastest boost clock out of the box that I've tested yet um if you're a dieh hard overclocker remember silicon Lottery matters more than anything that you put on the card and there's no way of knowing how well that card is going to perform uh until you get it and check it out you might get a a unicorn you might get a dud again that's why it's called the Silicon Lottery tell me what you guys think down in the comments about this card I find a lot of people love it and a lot of people hate it not many people in the middle ground and it all comes down to the styling The Styling on this is really kind of in your face some people like that and some don't you guys tell me do you like it and what other cards do you guys want me to check out because I'm going to uh kind of cut off the 1080 reviews here pretty soon I don't want to do too many 1080 reviews and obviously we've got the 1060 launching right around the corner and I want to look at some more 1070s with that said gu with that with that said guys I'm going to go ahead and get on out of here thanks for watching and I will see you guys in the next video\n"