Zotac RTX 2070 AMP Extreme Review

Conclusion

We said in our introduction that the Zotac AMP range is famous for its insane performance levels and ability to be overclocked, and the RTX 2070 is no exception.

One element common to all of the RTX cards we’ve reviewed is their incredible consistency in performance. From the basic to the ludicrous, from mid-range to wallet-emptying, the newest nVidia Turing GPU has a relentless ability to extract the maximum from every single clock cycle, and it takes an awful lot for a manufacturer to tweak it up to the point it really makes a difference. With the Zotac AMP Extreme it comes out of the box with a seriously meaty overclock and this is borne out in our graphs where it regularly found itself ahead of the RTX 2070 pack.

What really separates it though is the overclocking performance and its capability to run at a high average clock for long periods of time. Hitting a peak is pointless if you can’t sustain it for the whole duration of the race. Usain Bolt would be the first after 200m in any marathon, but last by the time they’d hit half distance. It’s the same with graphics cards. Nobody games in 30 second bunches – unless you’re playing Warioware – and thus having a high initial boost clock speed doesn’t affect the final score in the way that sustaining that high clock can do. A quick glance at our average clock speed graph – page four if you impatiently jumped straight here – shows how beautifully the Zotac AMP Edition hits a high clock speed and then carries on, even in “out of the box” trim.

The aesthetics are pretty good, albeit not quite as jaw dropping as some we’ve seen. The card is enormous thanks to that beefy triple fan cooler and seriously chunky heatsink, and the bracing adds to the solidity of the whole package. It feels like it was hewn from granite. The fan surround is fine, not awful but not especially noteworthy. Temperature performance is good though, especially for a card that runs this hard and fast, yet does so without demanding more power than any of the other TU106 offerings.

It’s a great card if you want to fit and forget, but if you’re willing to do a little light fettling then it responds well and topped our RTX 2070 group in all but a couple of our tests. Obviously they all do well, but if you’re demanding nothing but best possible performance at a surprisingly affordable price then the Zotac should be at the top of your wishlist. With a MSRP of £599 it’s cheaper than a lot of the factory overclocked options, and faster than them all too, which wins it our OC3D Performance Award.

  

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