ZOTAC GTX 960 AMP Edition review: Sturdy build and good performance, pricing needs correction though

We had tested the **Asus Strix GTX 960** couple of months back and were impressed with the performance. This time around we have another factory overclocked card in the form of Zotac GTX 960 AMP! Edition. Zotac’s AMP! Edition cards are factory-overclocked flavours of the stock card. With the GTX 960 AMP! edition, Zotac has made some design modifications. Let us have a look. Build and Design: 8/10  Zotac cards generally follow the black and yellow design theme. But with the GTX 960 AMP! Edition you only get a black coloured card with a gray colour tone on the frame. The card is well designed and feels sturdy thanks to the metallic frame to protect the rear PCB circuitry and a tough plastic shroud up front. The plastic shroud is placed above the aluminum heat sink chamber and has two 90mm fans up front. There are two copper pipes which form a loop on the right hand side of the aluminum heat sink. The shroud is not only sturdy but makes the card look aesthetically pleasing as well. On the top right hand corner you have a 6-pin power connector and on the left hand side you have the single SLI slot. Features: 7/10  Zotac GTX 960 AMP Edition has a base clock speed of 1266MHz (1127MHz on a stock GTX960) and boost clock speed of 1329MHz (which is 1178MHz on the stock GTX 960). These are significant boosts over stock speeds. This is paired with 2GB of GDDR5 RAM with a 128-bit memory bus. The card comes with three DisplayPorts, one HDMI port and one DVI port.  The card is capable of 4K video output via the DisplayPort and HDMI port.  The GTX 960 houses the GM206 GPU. Made on the 28nm manufacturing process, the GM206 GPU has around 2.9 billion transistors. There are two fully enabled Graphics Processing Clusters (GPC) each with four SMM’s. Since each SMM has around 128 CUDA cores, you get a total of 1024 CUDA cores on the GM206 GPU. There are 32 raster operators (ROPs) and 64 texture mapping units (TMUs). It supports Nvidia ShadowPlay, MFAA, dynamic super resolution, voxel global illumination, G-Sync and other Nvidia-specific features.  Zotac also bundles in its own Firestorm utility along with the card. This utility lets you tweak clock speeds, fan speeds, memory settings and so on. You can also monitor voltages and temperatures. Test Setup Processor: Intel Core i7-4770K Motherboard: ASRock Z87M Extreme4 RAM: 2 x 4GB GSkill RipjawsX Drive: Intel SSD, 80GB (boot drive) Additional Drive: Western Digital Velociraptor, 150GB (secondary) PSU: Cooler Master 800W Silent Pro Gold OS: Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit Monitor: BenQ GL2250 Benchmarks Performance: 7/10 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.  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. Here are the frame rates we got.  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. Here are the frame rates we got.  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. Here are the frame rates we got.  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. Here are the frame rates we got.  Temperature: 7/10 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 and Metro: Last Light and taking an average.  Power Consumption: 8/10 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 As seen in the charts above, in terms of performance, the Zotac GTX 960 AMP! Edition and the Asus GTX 960 give almost similar scores. The only area where you notice a major difference is with temperature readings. The Zotac card gets sufficiently hot at 84 degrees on load, this is almost 20 degrees higher than the Asus card, on auto fan settings. Even manually keeping the fan at 75% fanspeed, gave us 74 degrees load temperature, which is still 10 degrees higher than that seen on the Asus card. In terms of power consumption the Asus card consumes slightly more power on load as compared to the Zotac card. It all comes down to price points. While the MRP for the Zotac GTX 960 is at Rs 21,320 - too high a price point - you can get it online for around Rs 17,900 onwards. The Asus GTX 960 is available for Rs 16,000 with the online retailers. The price of Zotac card should ideally be at the same level as the Asus card for us to recommend it, as there is nothing exceptional on offer to justify the price gap.