Zotac GTX 980 AMP! Extreme Review

 A Closer Look

Nice and shiny! but the front of the box lists a few of the features including the OC+ features, 4GB of DDR5 memory, the improved Ice Storm cooling and Light.id system.

The rear of the box goes into a little more detail over the features on the front. The Light.id system is a dual colour lighting system which has accent strips on two of the fans and across the top; these LED’s can glow red or green and change depending on the load of the graphics card. Or they can be turned off entirely if lighting isn’t your thing.

The GTX980 is surrounded by large wads of foam, which should help when the card is in transit.

With the card you get two, eight pin PCI-Express adapters, a DVI to VGA adapter, and a micro usb cable which attaches to an internal header port.

That micro usb cable attaches to the OC+ connector on the graphics card, next to this OC+ connector are some traces for measuring voltages directly on the PCB, as well as an LN2_OTP switch which disables a few of the protections in place when you are using extreme cooling.

The ZOTAC GTX980 AMP! Extreme takes two 8 pin connectors. If you look to the right in this image you can see some of the additional cooling applied to the circuitry around the main GPU, that thick bit of grey being a thermal pad.

On the rear of the card, the Carbon look continues, with cut outs for the Power Boost capacitors that have very shiny casings.

Very Shiny!

Here you can see some of the extra detail on the fans themselves, the centre on having grooves on the blades whilst the two on the side, have twists in the blades. All of these changes with the inclusion of the shroud are to help make sure all of the air is being channelled throughout the massive heatsink.

You get a DVI-I port with three full-size Display Port connectors and a solitary HDMI port on the back of the card.

The ZOTAC GTX980 AMP! Extreme glows one of two colours depending on the load of the graphics card, when idle it will glow green and when the graphics card is put under load it glows red. This lighting system is quite bright and looks quite nice in my test bench. When fitted to a normal machine with a clear side panel it may lose some of this pizzaz.