Packaging and Closer Look
Zotac has introduced a new box art design with their GTX 1080/1070 AMP and AMP Extreme graphics cards. You now have Yellow as the dominant color, compared to the Black box last year. The GTX 1070 AMP! Extreme’s box is quite big since it houses a large graphics card inside. You get a box within a box and the graphics card is nicely cradled on thick foams. The package also includes a driver CD, quick installation guide and two dual 6-pin to 8-pin PCIe adapter.
Above we have the front and rear view of the Zotac GTX 1070 AMP! Extreme. It looks great and feels robust, but it’s also big and heavy (for a reason). The front cooler shroud has three fans and is surrounded with LED lighting. At the back, you see Zotac’s logo together with their “Push the Limit” slogan. The backplate looks nice and it wraps-around the rear and side portion of the graphics card. However, I feel that a darker tone or similar color tone to the front shroud would be aesthetically more pleasing compared to the greyish color tone.
To show you just how big is the GTX 1070 AMP! Extreme, here’s how the GTX 1070 AMP! Extreme looks like right beside the Zotac GTX 980 Ti AMP!. The GTX 1070 AMP! Extreme is not only thicker than the GTX 980 Ti AMP, but it’s also a little bit taller and longer as well.
I do not have a weighing scale lying around, but I bet this AMP! Extreme weighs a kilo or more. You might want to install a support bracket or have it installed on a standing position (depending on your chassis).
At the back there’s the usual SLI bridge, but this time NVIDIA is limiting their GTX 1080 and 1070 cards to two-way SLI. Well, you still can do 3-way and 4-way SLI with the GTX 1080/1070 but don’t expect that they will have the same support like the 2-way SLI configuration. NVIDIA is really discouraging 3-way and 4-way SLI with the new 10 series GPUs; and they even removed SLI on the GTX 1060. NVIDIA also introduced the new High Bandwidth or HB SLI Bridge that is said to have better SLI performance compared to the previous SLI bridges. I’m not sure if Zotac will be offering HB SLI Bridge anytime soon.
On the rear side of the card, you see two 8-pin PCIe power connector with LED indicator. The “Push the Limit” logo at the back lit up together with the LEDs on the front and center-side.
On the output ports, you have an HDMI 2.0b port, a DL-DVI port and 3x DisplayPort 1.4. This card supports HDCP and is capable of multiple display with up to 4 monitor connected. Now let’s remove the cooler shroud and see what’s inside.
Removing the cooler shroud was like removing 90% of the weight of the graphics card. The Carbon ExoArmor with the Icestorm cooler will occupy 2.5 slot spaces. You can see that there are a total of six copper heat pipes on the cooler and these heat pipes are connected to a taller array of aluminum fin stack. The memory chips are also cooled by the cooler, and there’s a separate aluminum plate cooling the card’s MOSFETs.
Above you have the front and back view of the Zotac GTX 1070 AMP! Extreme’s PCB. This is a custom designed PCB, but the layout is more or less similar with the reference one. From the first photo you can see an 8+3 power phase design, and at the back Zotac armed the GTX 1070 AMP! Extreme with a “Power Boost” chip. The Power Boost “reduces ripple noise and minimizes power fluctuation resulting in a longer lasting AMPed graphics cards. Even when pushed to the limit, it can maintain smoothness and stability”. There are also several headers at the end portion of the PCB for the fans and LED lighting.
Here’s a closer look at the GP104-200-A1 that powers the Zotac GTX 1070 AMP! Extreme. The GP104-200-A1 is a 16 nm fab process by TSMC, with 7.2 billion transistor count and 2,560 CUDA cores. It is surrounded by eight Samsung GDDR5 memory chips, for a total of 8GB of memory.
Was 2227MHz memory clock the highest you could push it? Seems a bit average for Samsung memory as I often see people claiming they slap on +600-800 (9200-9600 effective).
Temps and noise seem very nice though, i’m tempted.
Yes, at least for this specific card I got here. I tried to push the mem clocks further but artifacts started to show up and eventually it crashed. I have seen/read others who were able to push the memory clock (a little bit) higher just like what you said. But it didn’t happened with the card I have. Probably I may need to tweak some settings to balance things out. I’m hoping to get another GTX 1070 to compare, just not sure when.
And yes, temps and noise are really the selling point of this card. Not to mention, if you want something that really stands out.
Why don’t you do a side by side comparison with all GTX 1070? 😐
We definitely would. Unfortunately, the Zotac 1070 is currently what we have. We are still trying to acquire more graphics cards, but stocks are still erratic.
Will wait then. I wanted to see what card runs the fastest, runs the coolest and performs the best.
Runs the fastest out of the box? You can check out our article here and see who has the fastest clock speeds out of the box: https://thepcenthusiast.com/geforce-gtx-1070-compared-asus-evga-zotac-msi-gigabyte/
Do note that if one 1070 is 100MHz or 200MHz faster than the other one, the actual performance difference in real life is very small, sometimes unnoticeable or negligible during game play.
Performs the coolest = the Zotac gtx 1070 amp extreme with its monstrous cooler is no doubt one of the coolest gtx 1070 around.
Performs the best? Can you be a little bit specific? Because in the end, there are all the same GTX 1070 inside. As per aesthetics, that’s really a personal choice.
By the way, I found this video from Tech Deals. And he has compared 7 different GTX 1070s and I think we share the same opinion about all these GTX 1070s. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nf__ZGD9SUQ
Performs the best, as to what I mean by that is “Overall performance” now a days reviewers only review one GPU and stack it over old (1 or 2 year old). I don’t relaly care about the aesthetic of the GPU. All I care is how it performs.
I want to see more of those Graph where you compare them side by side. It doesn’t impact me if people compare it to a previous gen GPU. I am more inclined into the same series being compared.
Like I said before their performance difference between different models is not that significant. Have you watched the video?
If you want the fastest GTX 1070 out of the box, better hunt for the one with the highest clock speeds. You can see it from the list (link I gave you).
I noticed that as well, even the big tech sites with access to almost all GPUs in the market doesn’t do that. Well, Guru3D seems to have made some changes with their recent graphics card review style.
http://www.guru3d.com/index.php?ct=articles&action=file&id=25572&admin=0a8fcaad6b03da6a6895d1ada2e171002a287bc1
Let’s just see if we can acquire more 1070s, we don’t have access to all brands, but we’ll add it to the comparison if ever we have the chance.
this is a great card. got it in my system and run it at 2145, that’s when its not been auto turned down by NVidia. After that theres artifects. Feel very lucky. Its so quit, cold and fast, I’m shocked.
Great review.. regarding the issue about the samsung chip and swapping it with a micron chip, should i worry much or not? i’m not planning to OC this card at all.. i read somewhere that they are having flickering issues with micron memory and samsung users doesn’t have this problem at all..
i asked zotac about this but they are not answering yet.. hoping someone with a zotac 1070 with micron chip will clear things up.. thanks! more reviews! 🙂
The zotac gtx 1070 amp extreme has Samsung chip. You can see that on the “closer look section” of this review. Not sure if they released a 1070 amp extreme with a micron. some manufacturers have already released a BIOS update to address the micron issue.
Did you, by chance, get a 1070 amp extreme with a micron memory?
as of now i’m still saving money to buy 1070 amp extreme.. just a bit worried about that issue.. hopefully i will get the samsung chip..
We’ll ask Zotac if they only use Samsung memory chips or if some batches have Micron chips.
I’ll comment back when I have the answer.
@ronellkirareyes:disqus Got a note from Zotac. They said “All board partners must use both Micron and Samsung memory. This is
across all product models.”. So basically there’s a chance that you may or may not get a GTX 10 with Micron chips.
thanks for this great info.. if the bios update can potentially fix this issue, i might reconsider this one again.. since i’ve been searching for a good 1070 card for a while, and finding all of them have their cons.. which is a bit frustrating since i’m going to use this card for my work (3d modeling and pbr texturing).. and earning cash is not easy.. 🙁
thanks Again Jeff.. 🙂
unfortunately we don’t know how to tell if the unit comes with Micron or Samsung without opening it. My GTX 1080 has micron chips and I have been playing BF1 for almost 33 hours, Deus, Quantum and Titanfall2 as well. I haven’t encountered any issues yet. Although I haven’t tried it for rendering work. If the problem with Micron is really huge and affecting all Zotac 1070s, I’m sure they’ll release an update to fix it. Hopefully the newer cards will come with updated bios already.