ZOTAC Gaming GeForce RTX 2080 Ti AMP Edition

It's been almost 2 months since NVIDIA announced its new GeForce RTX cards, but we have some of the latest RTX games.

While everyone is still waiting for the game of the game developers, let's have a look at the ZOTAC GeForce RTX Gaming 2080 Ti AMP we have here. As of now, the GeForce RTX 2080 is probably the most powerful single GPU graphics card you can find in the consumer market, but just how much difference can we really get in terms of the raw performance as compared to the top tier of the previous gen GeForce GTX 10 series cards?

Specifications

GPU Model	GeForce RTX 2080 Ti
CUDA Cores	4352
Base Clock	1350 MHz
Boost Clock	1665 MHz
Effective Memory Clock	14000 MHz
Display Output	3 x DisplayPort (4096 × 2160 @ 60Hz) HDMI 2.0 (3840 × 2160 @ 60Hz)
Memory Size	11264 MB GDDR6
Memory Bus Width	352-bit
Memory Bandwidth	616 GB / s
Interface	PCI-Express 3.0 x16
Thermal Design Power	260W
Recommended Power Supply	650W
Power Input	2 x 8-pin
Dimension	308mm x 113mm x 57mm
Slot Size	2.5 Slot

unboxing

ZOTAC Gaming mantle this time design for its GeForce RTX cards. More gray, low poly geometrical design can be seen on the box instead of the usual ZOTAC yellow. Also, the box is huge, probably the biggest one we've seen so far.

That aside, you'll also find the highlighted features i.e ZOTAC's new Fire Storm software, the RGB features, and the new Ray Tracing and GDDR6 memory of the latest GeForce RTX cards.

At the back of the box, you will find a brief description of the product itself, with a list of features, minimum system requirements and the specifications of the card.

While we do not usually highlight the inner packaging when it comes to unboxing a graphics card, this one is the first exception. What you have here is actually a transparent cover that comes with black stripes to create an optical illusion, where the image of the fan seems to be spinning.

The extra effort from ZOTAC providing a different kind of unboxing experience is definitely something worth to be highlighted.

There is not much room for you but the box. All you'll get is two pieces of Dual 6-pin to 8-pin adapter and a pack of papers that includes quick installation guide, product catalog and welcome note.

As for the card, it's very well packaged in the box. If you are going to have a great deal of it, the extremely thick protective foam of the ZOTAC Gaming GeForce RTX 2080 Ti AMP is placed in the most important of the cards.

The ZOTAC Gaming GeForce RTX 2080 Ti AMP

Starting from with the dimension (308mm x 113mm x 57mm, taking up 2.5 slots) of the card, the ZOTAC Gaming GeForce RTX 2080 Ti AMP is a pretty long time to begin with, and thick one as well. If you take a closer look at it, other than the 3 cooling fans available, the cooler shroud of the ZOTAC Gaming GeForce RTX 2080 Ti AMP actually resembles the design of the GTX 10 series Founders Cooler Edition.

While the batches of the RTX 20 series are quite the same in terms of the PCB used – since it's all based on the reference design, you will not get too much of the fancy RGB blingy elements, yet. For those of you who are not really into RGB, this is probably something for you to consider.

Since NVIDIA has a lot of coolers, we can expect a little more from the Turing GPU. Here we can see that ZOTAC has a large amount of ZOTAC Gaming GeForce RTX 2080 Ti AMP. The PCB of the card is made of a complete metal plate and is very easy to use.

As for the cooling fan, ZOTAC has something new for this round of release. The new fan blade design is known as the multi-stage blade, which according to ZOTAC, is able to generate multiple air currents that helps to cool down the card with minimal effort.

Like we've mentioned earlier, the RGB elements are very minimal on the ZOTAC Gaming GeForce RTX 2080 Ti AMP. Just in case you're not really into RGB, the lighting can be disabled as well. For the power requirement, you'll need a power supply unit with 650W and two 8-pin PCIe power connectors to power up the card.

Last but not least, you'll have three DisplayPort 1.4, one HDMI 2.0b and USB Type-C for your display output. The USB Type-C port here is meant for the next generation VR headset, but you can also charge your USB Type-C device i.e tablet, smartphone or transfer file using this port.

Test System Setup

For our games benchmark test, we have selected a number of AAA titles to run at a temperature of 31 ° C:

CPU	Intel Core i7 8700K @ 5GHz
Motherboard	ASUS ROG Maximus X Apex
Memory	G.Skill TridentZ RGB 16GB @ 3200MHz
Graphics Card	ZOTAC Gaming GeForce RTX 2080 Ti AMP
Power Supply	Cooler Master V1200
Primary Storage	Apacer Panther S340
Secondary Storage	WD Black 6TB
CPU Cooler	Raijintek Orcus 240
Frame	Cooler Master Test Bench V1
Operating System	Windows 10

The DirectX 11 and DirectX 12 at the resolution of 1920 × 1080, 2560 × 1440 and 3840 × 2160 using the RTX 2080 against its predecessor, the GTX 1080 Ti.

Games Benchmark – DirectX 11

As we all know, a single GTX 1080 Ti is already a pretty powerful graphics card to start with. From the performance comparison above, we can see that the ZOTAC Gaming GeForce RTX 2080 Ti AMP leads the game with ease, but gaming on 1080p is not enough to show what the card is capable of.

We have a higher resolution, we can see that the GTX 1080 Ti started to struggle a little on demanding title like HITMAN on 1440p, not being able to keep up to 60fps on average. As for the ZOTAC Gaming GeForce RTX 2080 Ti AMP, we can see that the card has no problem in keeping up with an average of 60fps.

On our 4K benchmark, we have the best possible settings with anti-aliasing disabled. Although the titles are still playable on the GTX 1080 Ti, the average fps for most of the titles are under the ideal 60fps. The ZOTAC Gaming GeForce RTX 2080 Ti is the best of the world, except for HITMAN and Watch Dogs 2.

Games Benchmark – DirectX 12

Bigger performance gap can be observed from the DirectX 12 games test, where the ZOTAC Gaming GeForce RTX 2080 Ti AMP overwhelmed the GTX 1080 Ti in most of the titles used for the test. With Total War: WARHAMMER as an exception, we're looking at a difference of at least 22% performance difference.

Moving on to 1440p, both the ZOTAC Gaming RTX 2080 TI AMP and GTX 1080 Ti seem to be holding up pretty well still, except for HITMAN. With the GTX 1080 Ti already under 60fps on one title, the ZOTAC Gaming RTX 2080 TI AMP still remains unfazed with an average 60fps, almost.

As for gaming performance on 4K, this is where the ZOTAC Gaming RTX 2080 TI AMP shines. Other than the surprising demanding HITMAN on 4K, it's able to hold up for the rest of the titles and widen its performance gap with the GTX 1080 Ti.

On side note, it seems that ZOTAC is doing a great job with its new cooling fan and cooler design for the ZOTAC Gaming RTX 2080 TI AMP. The GPU temperature hovers between 64 ° C to 66 ° C throughout the test and 34 ° C during idle. The only downside, a rather subjective one, would be the lack of the 0db fan design.

First Impressions

If you plan to game on 1080p and 1440p, the ZOTAC Gaming RTX 2080 TI can handle almost everything AAA titles thrown at it without much issue – though, that will be a waste for such a capable card. Based on the numbers that we have gathered from the test, we can see that gaming on 4K is one of the way to display the capability of the ZOTAC Gaming RTX 2080 TI AMP, but that's just a small part of it. Of course, there's no denying that the ZOTAC Gaming RTX 2080 TI AMP is still in progress.

Even though we've already received the Windows 10 October 2018 update, there's still no way for us to properly gauge the RTX 2080 Ti without any RTX games. NVIDIA's keynote at Gamescom 2018, there's still no way for us to explore the untapped potential of the dedicated RT and Tensor cores on the Turing GPU.

Hence, it's still too early for us to be worthwhile RM 5,379 on the ZOTAC Gaming RTX 2080 TI AMP, really. If you're in for pure raw performance, or perhaps a good wait for the upcoming RTX games, then the ZOTAC Gaming RTX 2080 TI is one of the choices of GeForce RTX 2080 Ti to consider for.