this is a product I've been wanting to take a look at for a while this is the
Zotac GeForce GTX 480 amp Edition so
it's a GTX 480 But it includes an aftermarket cooler and Zotac was
actually one of if not the first to Market with an aftermarket cool GTX 480
something that it really benefits from because it'll run quite a bit cooler
quite a bit quieter so it'll go around have a look at the back it's the same
usual uh marketing stuff on the back of the box you know what this one's going
to be all about having a look at the card itself so let's get this baby
opened up and see what Zotac includes
with the GTX 480 amp edition first of
all this is quite an attractive looking card it has a dual turbine VGA cooler
which basically looks like uh two 92 mm
fans you can see part of the fan is actually covered by the Shroud a little
bit there it's got kind of a neat graphic on the front of it the one thing
you'll notice right away about about this cooler is that it is triple slot so
you see the back plate is dual slot you've got one more slot worth of cooler
here and that's something that you will have to sacrifice in order to use the
amp Edition card other than that it is a
stock reference GTX 480 so you can see right here they haven't changed the PCB
to account for the different cooler uh here I'll show you a stock uh stock
cooled Zotac gtx480 over here so you can
see the back of the card will look identical
okay but it's all about the changes that they've made to the cooler so I wouldn't
expect any better overclocking results on The Amp Edition because of it being
cherry-picked or anything like that but I would definitely expect better
overclocking results due to the additional GPU cooling so you can see
that we've got uh I'm actually just going to cheat a little bit and count
them here 1 2 3 4 five heat pipes coming
off of the GPU contact area so one of them comes up this way the next one goes
up uh that way and runs all the way to the end so three of the heat pipes run
down to the end over here and then two of them run down to these ends one here
and one here one disadvantage of the amp series cooler is that it does not
exhaust the heat out of the case like the stock cooler does so you can see
here all of that heat is being exhausted by the fan out the back of the case but
that is not the case with the amp so you will have to make sure you have a well
ventilated case but I mean if you're buying a almost $600 graphics card you
uh should probably get a decent case to go along with it one thing I really like
about the amp is you can see they've got a custom p uh custom heat sink under the
amp cooler for the GPU so that's going to take care of all of your RAM all of
your vrms all of that good stuff and uh
compared to the aftermarket solution that I'll be comparing the amp to uh
it's quite a bit more elegant so I just wanted to show it very briefly next to
the GED Solutions icy Vision so I'm just
going to move the Box away uh in terms of accessories you got a couple Molex to
PCIe a dual PCI a six pin to eight pin you got a mini HDMI to HDMI a DVI to VGA
you got some documentation and let's get
back to the card because that is what it's all about for this particular video
so here's the IC Vision here's the amp
and here is a stock cooled card
okay so all of them look pretty similar
both the amp and the IC Vision I'm going to look at them from the side but both
of these are going to be three slot coolers so you're not going to be able
to make use of the slot next to the card nor the next one but a lot of SLI
compatible motherboards that's not going to be a problem as long as you don't
intend to install uh any other cards besides your graphics cards they both
include 92 mm fans dual ones uh the icy
Vision you can see has a similar number of heat pipes it's got five heat pipes
but they are arranged a little bit differently and it also has a not as
elegant a solution for cooling all the other parts of the card so you can see
you got to kind of Stack up a bunch of different heat sinks on the vrms you got
these little wussy memory heat sinks down here now it's probably going to be
perfectly adequate I wouldn't worry about the card being damaged in any way
but I do like this solution better where you got one nice big unisync style thing
and it's cooling all the different parts of the card it's nice and beefy there so
just like the normal gtx480 it uses 18 pin and one 16 pin connector and other
than that I guess there's not really a whole lot to say thank you for checking
out my unboxing of the Zotac amp Edition GTX 480 and hopefully I'll have a
temperature comparison up for you in the next little bit here actually one thing
I forgot to include about the amp Edition card is a quick cost comparison
so you can see that the regular Zotac GTX 480 is uh 519 after rebate so that's
actually $549.99 before rebate and then
the amp Edition card is actually only another uh $30 uh before rebate and then
only another $60 after rebate whereas if
you grab an IC oh shoot I lost my search result whereas if you buy a regular 480
with an icy Vision you're actually looking at about the same price except
that you have to do the work of installing the aftermarket cooler so if
you are buying a gtx480 and you do intend to install uh a big uh three slot
aftermarket cooler on it I see no reason not to go with an amp Edition cuz it
does come with a lifetime warranty and it saves you the trouble of installing
that cooler on it it also means that the warranty will cover you for the
aftermarket Cooling