Packaging and Closer Look
The box art of the Zotac GTX 980 Ti AMP Edition is pretty much similar to Zotac’s entire GTX 900 series graphics card. Most of the GTX 980 Ti AMP!’s features is written at the back of the box.
The package includes some reading materials, a Zotac sticker, a driver CD, two Molex to 8-pin PCIe adapter, and a DVI to VGA adapter. I browse the reading materials and was pleased to see that it was well written and properly laid out. Most of the time, we tend to disregard the reading materials included in the package.
Above is the front view of the Zotac GTX 980 Ti AMP! Edition. From this angle, the GTX 980 Ti AMP! is almost exactly the same as the GTX 970 AMP! Extreme Core Edition. However, the latter didn’t come with Freeze Tech, thus the fans are always running regardless of the GPU’s temperature or load.
Of all the Zotac’s GTX 900 series graphics card, I think their 980 Tis have the better looking back plate with their slogan “Push The Limit”. I’ll try to push this graphics card to higher clock speeds later.
The GTX 980 Ti AMP! has a total of 5 display outputs. The output ports includes: 1x DVI, 1x HDMI and 3x DisplayPorts. The card can support multiple monitor setup and you can connect up to 4 monitors at the same time. The DVI port can handle up to 2560 x 1600 display resolution, while the HDMI and DisplayPorts can handle up to 4K resolution @ 60Hz.
The graphics card draws its power from an 8+6 power connector and it is recommended that you must have at least a 600W power supply. Of course, if you have lots of components installed on your system like multiple hard drives, custom water cooling system, etc, and specially if you plan to install multiple graphics card, you need to use a higher capacity PSU, preferably 900W or 1000W with 80 Plus certification.
The Zotac GTX 980 Ti AMP’s shroud has a two-tone or two-texture design. First is the plain gunmetal surface, and the other is a semi-glossy patterned accent. The heat pipes are also not exposed which I think looks pretty neat and clean. However, unlike the GTX 970 AMP Extreme Core Edition, the ZOTAC logo on this one doesn’t have a LED back light. But if you are resourceful and creative enough, you can customize the cooler and place a LED since there is an extra two pin power connector on the graphics card which Zotac hasn’t utilized.
Zotac uses the ICESTORM Technology in their cooler, which is composed of 3x 90mm fans and 5 copper heat pipes connected to a large aluminum fin stack and an aluminum base plate that also cools most of the memory chips. It’s also quite noticeable that the cooler shroud and its wrap around back plate are a bit longer than its PCB. Aside from the huge aluminum fin stack and aluminum base plate attached to the shroud, there’s also another heatsink that is cooling the other components specially the VRMs (as seen on the photo below).
Above you see the front and rear view of the card’s PCB. If I am not mistaken the PCB is similar to the reference GeForce GTX 980 Ti.
Above you see the GM204-310-A1 Maxwell chip which is the core of every GTX 980 Ti graphics card. It’s basically a trimmed down version of the TITAN X’s GPU chip. The core is surrounded by twelve SK hynix H5GQ4H24MFR memory chips, for a total of 6GB.
Let’s proceed to the next page for the test setup I used to benchmark the Zotac GTX 980 Ti AMP! Edition.
