Zotac NVIDIA GeForce GTX 480 AMP! Edition Unboxing & First Look Linus Tech Tips
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2011-05-08
·
1,171 words · ~5 min read
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this is a product I've been wanting to take a look at for a while this is the
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Zotac GeForce GTX 480 amp Edition so
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it's a GTX 480 But it includes an aftermarket cooler and Zotac was
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actually one of if not the first to Market with an aftermarket cool GTX 480
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something that it really benefits from because it'll run quite a bit cooler
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quite a bit quieter so it'll go around have a look at the back it's the same
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usual uh marketing stuff on the back of the box you know what this one's going
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to be all about having a look at the card itself so let's get this baby
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opened up and see what Zotac includes
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with the GTX 480 amp edition first of
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all this is quite an attractive looking card it has a dual turbine VGA cooler
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which basically looks like uh two 92 mm
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fans you can see part of the fan is actually covered by the Shroud a little
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bit there it's got kind of a neat graphic on the front of it the one thing
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you'll notice right away about about this cooler is that it is triple slot so
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you see the back plate is dual slot you've got one more slot worth of cooler
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here and that's something that you will have to sacrifice in order to use the
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amp Edition card other than that it is a
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stock reference GTX 480 so you can see right here they haven't changed the PCB
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to account for the different cooler uh here I'll show you a stock uh stock
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cooled Zotac gtx480 over here so you can
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see the back of the card will look identical
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okay but it's all about the changes that they've made to the cooler so I wouldn't
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expect any better overclocking results on The Amp Edition because of it being
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cherry-picked or anything like that but I would definitely expect better
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overclocking results due to the additional GPU cooling so you can see
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that we've got uh I'm actually just going to cheat a little bit and count
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them here 1 2 3 4 five heat pipes coming
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off of the GPU contact area so one of them comes up this way the next one goes
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up uh that way and runs all the way to the end so three of the heat pipes run
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down to the end over here and then two of them run down to these ends one here
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and one here one disadvantage of the amp series cooler is that it does not
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exhaust the heat out of the case like the stock cooler does so you can see
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here all of that heat is being exhausted by the fan out the back of the case but
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that is not the case with the amp so you will have to make sure you have a well
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ventilated case but I mean if you're buying a almost $600 graphics card you
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uh should probably get a decent case to go along with it one thing I really like
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about the amp is you can see they've got a custom p uh custom heat sink under the
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amp cooler for the GPU so that's going to take care of all of your RAM all of
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your vrms all of that good stuff and uh
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compared to the aftermarket solution that I'll be comparing the amp to uh
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it's quite a bit more elegant so I just wanted to show it very briefly next to
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the GED Solutions icy Vision so I'm just
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going to move the Box away uh in terms of accessories you got a couple Molex to
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PCIe a dual PCI a six pin to eight pin you got a mini HDMI to HDMI a DVI to VGA
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you got some documentation and let's get
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back to the card because that is what it's all about for this particular video
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so here's the IC Vision here's the amp
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and here is a stock cooled card
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okay so all of them look pretty similar
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both the amp and the IC Vision I'm going to look at them from the side but both
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of these are going to be three slot coolers so you're not going to be able
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to make use of the slot next to the card nor the next one but a lot of SLI
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compatible motherboards that's not going to be a problem as long as you don't
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intend to install uh any other cards besides your graphics cards they both
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include 92 mm fans dual ones uh the icy
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Vision you can see has a similar number of heat pipes it's got five heat pipes
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but they are arranged a little bit differently and it also has a not as
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elegant a solution for cooling all the other parts of the card so you can see
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you got to kind of Stack up a bunch of different heat sinks on the vrms you got
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these little wussy memory heat sinks down here now it's probably going to be
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perfectly adequate I wouldn't worry about the card being damaged in any way
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but I do like this solution better where you got one nice big unisync style thing
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and it's cooling all the different parts of the card it's nice and beefy there so
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just like the normal gtx480 it uses 18 pin and one 16 pin connector and other
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than that I guess there's not really a whole lot to say thank you for checking
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out my unboxing of the Zotac amp Edition GTX 480 and hopefully I'll have a
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temperature comparison up for you in the next little bit here actually one thing
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I forgot to include about the amp Edition card is a quick cost comparison
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so you can see that the regular Zotac GTX 480 is uh 519 after rebate so that's
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actually $549.99 before rebate and then
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the amp Edition card is actually only another uh $30 uh before rebate and then
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only another $60 after rebate whereas if
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you grab an IC oh shoot I lost my search result whereas if you buy a regular 480
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with an icy Vision you're actually looking at about the same price except
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that you have to do the work of installing the aftermarket cooler so if
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you are buying a gtx480 and you do intend to install uh a big uh three slot
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aftermarket cooler on it I see no reason not to go with an amp Edition cuz it
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does come with a lifetime warranty and it saves you the trouble of installing
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that cooler on it it also means that the warranty will cover you for the
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aftermarket Cooling