ZOTAC GeForce GTX 1070 AMP! Extreme Review

Name: ZOTAC GeForce GTX 1070 AMP Extreme
Brand: ZOTAC

by Marco Chiappetta — Tuesday, November 08, 2016, 11:15 AM EDT

Overclocking, Power Consumption, Noise, and Temps

We also spent a little time overlcocking the Zotac GeForce GTX 1070 AMP! Extreme Edition card to see what kind of additional performance it had left under its hood.

To overclock the card, we simply cranked up the temperature target and power targets to their maximum values and then we bumped up the GPU and memory clocks until the test system was no longer stable. We did not tweak fan speeds or voltages. Our goal was to find the maximum GPU clock for the card, without excessive tweaking, to give you all a realistic target and to see what temperatures looks like using the default profile. Of course, tweaking voltages and fan speeds would change the results (and potentially create more noise or lower temps), but since there are so many potential variables, we kept things simple and straightforward. Anyone that buys one of these cards will likely be able to achieve similar results.

The fruits of our labor are outlined in the image above. This data was captured after a number of benchmark runs to log the max temperature, GPU frequency, etc. while running actual games while overclocked. As you can see, the card peaked at a GPU clock of 2076MHz at a temperature of 66'C.

While we had the Zotac GeForce GTX 1070 AMP! Extreme Edition overclocked, we re-ran a couple of tests and saw some moderate improvements in performance in the games / settings we tested. Because the card was already factory overclocked, the additional bumps in performance aren't huge, but they do help inch the card's performance closer to the GTX 1080.

Total System Power Consumption

Tested at the Outlet

Before bringing this article to a close, we'd like to cover a couple of final data points -- namely, power consumption and noise. Throughout all of our benchmarking and testing, we monitored acoustics and tracked how much power our test system was consuming using a power meter. Our goal was to give you an idea of how much power each configuration used while idling and also while under a heavy workload. Please keep in mind that we were testing total system power consumption at the outlet here, not the power being drawn by the graphics cards alone.

The Zotac GeForce GTX 1070 AMP! Extreme Edition consumed moderately more power than the stock GeForce GTX 1070 Founder's Edition -- which you'd expect given that it is overclocked and stacked with three fans. It consumed less power than the Radeon R9 Nano or R9 390, however, despite offering significantly better performance.

In terms of its noise output, the Zotac GeForce GTX 1070 AMP! Extreme Edition is silent at idle (its fans stop spinning) so the noise baseline here is the result of all of the other system components. Under load, the three fans produced a bit more noise than most of the other cards we tested, but the Zotac GeForce GTX 1070 AMP! Extreme Edition is by no means loud.