ZOTAC GeForce GTX 780Ti AMP! Edition: Scorching fast without breaking a sweat

After the initial wave of reference cards, partner card makers come up with their own customisations. NVIDIA’s reference cooler design for the GTX 780Ti, is similar to the one seen on the GTX TITAN which was launched early last year. ZOTAC comes out with its own set of AMP edition cards which are basically factory overclocked cards. So let us see what goodness has been added to the stock GTX 780Ti in the ZOTAC GeForce GTX 780Ti AMP! Edition card.

Design and Build

ZOTAC has done away with the silver coloured stock NVIDIA design that we spoke about earlier and has instead gone with a custom cooler. The ZOTAC GTX 780Ti comes with a three-fan cooler which is surrounded by a sturdy metallic shroud. There is a comparatively larger orange coloured fan flanked by two smaller fans. Since all fans are controlled by a single header, you cannot control the rotational speed of the individual fans. There are two multi-finned chunks of aluminum heat sinks which also house the heat pipe to help with the heat dissipation. Even though the metallic shroud covers the card completely, it still has vents around all edges to assist in heat dissipation.

The ZOTAC GTX 780Ti AMP edition card comes with a 6-pin + 8-pin power supply. There is no protective backplate on the 780Ti AMP card. On the display side you have two DVI ports, a DisplayPort and an HDMI port.

Features ZOTAC GTX 780Ti AMP edition card is a factory overclocked card with the core clock of 1006MHz and a Boost clock of 1072MHz. This is around 15 per cent higher than the stock GTX 780Ti settings of 875MHz for the core clock and 928MHz. It houses 2880 CUDA cores, 240 texture mapping units and 48 ROPs. It has 3GB of GDDR5 video memory with a 384-bit memory bus interface.

The GTX 780Ti AMP edition is based on the Kepler GK110 GPU and is built on the 28nm process. It houses 7.1 billion transistors. It supports features such as DirectX 11.2, OpenGL 4.4, GPU Boost 2.0, adaptive Vsync, TXAA, FXAA, shadowplay and so on. It has two SLI connectors for multi-GPU configuration. ZOTAC have also bundled the Splinter Cell game compilation which includes games such as Double Agent, Conviction and Blacklist.

Test Setup Processor: Intel Core i7-4770K Motherboard: ASRock Z87M Extreme4 RAM: 2 x 4GB GSkill RipjawsX OS Drive: Plextor SSD, 256GB (boot drive) Additional Drive: Western Digital Velociraptor, 150GB (secondary) PSU: Cooler Master 800W Silent Pro Gold OS: Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit Monitor: ASUS PB278Q Catalyst Driver version: 13.11 Beta Nvidia driver version: 331.82

Performance 3DMark 11 3DMark is a computer benchmarking tool created and developed by Futuremark Corporation to determine the performance of a computer’s 3D graphic rendering and CPU workload processing capabilities. The latest version makes extensive use of all the new features in DirectX 11, including tessellation, compute shaders and multi-threading. We used the “Performance” preset for this benchmark.

Unigine Heaven 4.0 Unigine Heaven 4.0 is a DirectX 11 benchmark based on the Unigine engine which can be used to test the stability of a GPU under stressful conditions. It involves a run-through of an imaginary land involving floating islands, cobblestoned streets, smokey atmosphere, going through caves lit with burning fires, dragon statues and so on. You can adjust the tessellation, anti-aliasing filters, anisotropic filters etc. We run this test keeping the settings at Medium, no Anti-asliasing filter and Tessellation at Normal.

Please Note: Since we are introducing new gaming benchmarks and higher resolutions (2560×1440), some of the older cards reviewed are missing from the charts. We will update the scores of the older cards with new games and resolutions in the near future.

Battlefield 3 Battlefield 3 is a first-person shooter video game developed by EA Digital Illusions CE and is based on the new Frostbite 2 game engine. The game only supports DX10 and DX11, which enables enhanced in-game destruction with Destruction 3.0, creating more refined physics than its predecessor and quasi-realtime radiosity using Geometrics’ Enlighten technology. The game is a visual treat and a nightmare for graphics cards, which makes it perfect for our test. We used the “Ultra High” preset, Post AA – High, Blur – Full, Field of View – 90, Level – “Fear no Evil”.

Crysis 2 Crysis 2 is a first-person shooter video game developed by Crytek and is based on the new CryEngine 3. Just like the first iteration of the game, Crysis 2 continues to be one of the best-looking shooters to date. The settings used for this benchmark were “Ultra and High” preset in Adrenalin, DX11 and High-resolution texture patch.

Dirt 3 Dirt 3 is a rallying video game and the third in the Dirt series of the Colin McRae Rally series, developed and published by Codemasters. The game is extremely scalable and features DX11 tessellation effects. We used the built-in benchmark tool, along with “Ultra” quality preset.

Metro: Last Light Metro: Last Light is a first-person shooter video game that continues Metro’s legacy of being one of the most demanding games for the best of GPUs. The game has a lot of DX11 eye-candy, which really puts a strain on any GPU. All DX11 features were enabled for the benchmark and we used the built-in benchmark for this test.

Bioshock Infinite Bioshock Infinite developed by Irrational Games uses a modified version of the Unreal Engine. It’s a first-person shooter which takes place in a fictional floating city called Columbia. We ran the benchmark using the Adrenaline Benchmark tool and used the Ultra and Medium settings. In the Ultra settings you have FXAA On, Ultra texture detail, 16x AF, Ultra dynamic shadows and with the Medium settings you have FXAA On, High texture detail, 8x AF and High dynamic shadows.

Tomb Raider Tomb Raider is a third-person shooter which is a reboot of the famous series with Lara Croft as the protagonist. In this reboot, she is ship-wrecked on a mysterious island which presents its own set of challenges which Lara has to overcome. The game is based on a customised CrystalEngine. It also features the AMD TressFX technology which adds more realism to hair rendering and physics. We ran the benchmark using the in-built benchmark tool at the Ultimate and Ultra settings. On the Ultimate preset, you have TressFX activated, 16x AF, FXAA whereas the Ultra preset has Normal hair quality, 16x AF, FXAA.

Sleeping Dogs Sleeping Dogs is an open-world third-person action-adventure game developed by United Front games and Square Enix London Studios. Set in modern-day Hong Kong the game involves you playing as Wei Shan, an undercover cop, who infiltrates a local Triad gang. We ran the benchmark using the Adrenaline Benchmark tool and used the Ultra and Medium settings.

Temperatures We noted the temperature of all the participating cards at idle and load states. The fan speeds were kept on auto. We noted maximum load temperatures after running benchmarks such as FurMark at 1080p preset, 3D Mark 11, Battlefield 3 and Metro: Last Light and taking an average.

Power Consumption We used an energy monitoring device to measure the power consumed by the total rig with the graphics cards on them. The Cooler Master 800W PSU was plugged into the power meter which gave out the power consumed in Watts on the display. After powering on the system we let it stay unused for a good five minutes to get the idle power reading and then ran three instances of FurMark 1080p preset to get the maximum load power.

Verdict and Price in India Considering this is a factory overclocked version with around 15 percent higher speeds, we were expecting the best performance and that is what we got. It aces in almost every benchmark and the closest competitor to the ZOTAC GTX 780Ti AMP Edition is the ASUS R9290X DC2OC. Only in Sleeping Dogs did we find both cards performing at almost the same level. In terms of percentage the GTX 780Ti is around 7 per cent faster than the ASUS R9 290X overall, which isn’t that great a margin.

The best part about the GTX 780Ti AMP edition is that unlike the ASUS R9 290X, it does not emit very high temperatures or power consumption numbers despite the better performance. The three-fan cooler ensures that the load temperatures did not cross 70 degrees Celcius, which is wonderful for a card of this calibre. The ASUS R9 290X on the other hand reached 85 degrees on load. Similarly the total system power consumption with the 780Ti AMP Edition was around 326W on load which is almost 100W lower than ASUS R9 290X’s 420W.

Price point is a bit of a downer though. The ZOTAC GTX 780Ti AMP Edition comes at an MRP of Rs 60,500 which is not much higher than the stock NVIDIA GTX 780Ti which comes for around Rs 59,000. Agreed that the 780Ti is a brilliant card, but you can’t deny the fact it comes at a steep price. You can easily make a mid-range gaming rig in Rs 60,000. So unless you have a multi-monitor setup or a 2560x1440 or higher resolution monitor, the GTX 780Ti will be overkill for most buyers and it clearly is targeted at a niche segment.

So, like we said with in the ASUS R9290X review , if you are indeed looking for a great performing card without breaking the bank, the R9 290 cards from AMD make more sense from a value proposition perspective. The R9 290 performs 17 per cent slower than the 780Ti AMP! edition, but it comes around 70 per cent cheaper.