ZOTAC GTX 670 Amp Edition Review

We’ve seen what Nvidia’s latest graphics muncher is capable of and now it’s time to take a look at some of the other retail offerings in the market, starting with ZOTAC’s Amp Edition of the GTX 670. Not only is this factory overclocked, but it also features some elaborate cooling solutions, similar to Asus’s DirectCU II heatsinks. Despite all of this, ZOTAC have managed to keep the pricing very competitive, so let’s see how it fares with the rest of the cards out there.
Design and Build
There’s nothing sleek or classy about the design, infact ZOTAC has gone with a hardcore, vulgar design choice, which we quite like to be honest. There’s a skinny metal plate on the front covering the heatsink’s copper heatpipes that sprout out from the top. While this set-up certainly looks bad a**, the one problem is that is occupies a three slot in your cabinet, which can be an issue, if you have a sound card or anything else installed. We ran into a problem where the heatsink would collide against the SATA cables, since our motherboard has the ports facing upwards, rather than outwards.

For connectivity, we have two DVI ports, HDMI and a DisplayPort. There are vents above the ports, but due to the open nature of the card, the hot air will mostly be dispersed in the chassis itself, rather than directly outside. As usual, ZOTAC gives you a very satisfying bundle with all the cables, drivers, a game pack (TrackMania 2) and 5 year warranty.

Features
Since this is the overclocked edition, the core speed has been bumped up to 1.09GHz and the Boost clock set to 1.17GHz. This is quite a healthy overclock out-of-the-box from 915MHz and Boost clock of 980MHz. The memory remains 2GB GDDR5, but the frequency has increased to 6.6GHz. Rest of the features remain pretty much the same as the reference card we reviewed, which includes Adaptive Vertical Sync, FXAA, TXAA and 3DVision Surround.

Testbench

Processor: Intel Core i7-2600K CPU @ 3.40 GHz
Motherboard: GIGABYTE P67A-UD3R
Memory: G.Skill Ripjaws 8GB (4GB x 2) @1600MHz
Hard drive: Intel SSD 520 240GB (Boot Drive), WD Velociraptor 300GB (Secondary Drive)
GPU: ZOTAC GTX 670 Amp Edition
PSU: Cooler Master Silent Pro 1000W
OS: Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit