Temperature and Noise
The Zotac GeForce GTX 980 Ti AMP! Edition has a very effective cooling solution. On idle to light load, the GPU’s temperature is just around 45° to 50° degrees Celsius (or probably lower depending on your room temperature and system’s cooling capability). The HWMonitor screenshot below is the temperature I got when I fired up 3DMark’s Fire Strike benchmark at overclocked settings. As you can see, the peak temperature only reached 74° degrees Celsius.
In terms of noise, the GTX 980 Ti AMP! Edition is ultra-silent, since the fans don’t start spinning until it hits a particular temperature. Even at full load, the fans are still very silent and it’s virtually inaudible if you are using a closed CPU case. I’m using an open test bench and the system is sitting just right beside the monitor. So I can definitely hear if there’s any noise coming from the GPU. I’m also happy to say that this particular card didn’t suffer from any coil whine issues.
Overclocking the Zotac GTX 980 Ti AMP! Edition
I used Zotac’s FireStorm software to overclock the GTX 980 Ti AMP! Edition. Basically, its base clock speed of 1051MHz is already overclocked compared to the reference speed. Like what Zotac said, “Push The Limit”, I tried to push the clock speed even further and tried to match the stock speeds of their flagship GTX 980 Ti AMP! Extreme Edition.
The Zotac GTX 980 Ti AMP! Extreme has a GPU base clock speed of 1253 MHz with a 1355 MHz turbo boost speed, and a 7220 MHz memory clock speed. I was able to overclock the GTX 980 Ti AMP! Edition to a very close speed of 1251MHz base, 1340MHz boost and 7200MHz memory clock. That’s not bad at all!
Now, let’s proceed to the most important part of this review, the benchmark results of the GTX 980 Ti AMP! Edition.
