Introduction

Zotac GeForce RTX 3070 Ti AMP Extreme Holo is the company's most premium RTX 3070 Ti offering, targeting not just gamers, but also overclockers trying to beat RTX 3070 Ti records. It's backed by NVIDIA's new performance-segment chip with a monstrous VRM setup that's from a segment above and a cooling solution that could handle an RTX 3090. This Summer, NVIDIA augmented the higher end of its GeForce RTX 30-series "Ampere" graphics card family with the new RTX 3070 Ti and RTX 3080 Ti to try and fill some gaping holes in its lineup, especially when faced with strong (and unexpected) competition from the Radeon RX 6800 series and flagship RX 6900 XT.



The GeForce RTX 3070 Ti is designed to offer a compelling product in the $500–$600 segment (fantasy land prices) as the older RTX 3070 was bested by the Radeon RX 6800 and faces competition from the RX 6700 XT. The company appears to have avoided the temptation of basing the RTX 3070 Ti on the larger GA102 silicon and instead maxed out the GA104, which the RTX 3070 nearly maxes out. All 6,144 CUDA cores are enabled, along with 48 RT cores, 192 Tensor cores, 192 TMUs, and 96 ROPs. NVIDIA also opted for the much faster 19 Gbps GDDR6X memory as opposed to the 14 Gbps GDDR6 on the RTX 3070, which accounts for a 35% memory bandwidth uplift.

The GeForce Ampere graphics architecture heralds the second generation of NVIDIA's path-breaking RTX technology, which combines 2nd-generation RT cores that have hardware acceleration for more real-time raytracing effects, 3rd generation Tensor cores that leverage sparsity to improve AI inference performance by an order of magnitude, and the Ampere CUDA cores that offer concurrent INT+FP32 operations and increased IPC. The design goal has been to minimize the performance impact of raytracing on game performance. Helping matters here is also NVIDIA's popular DLSS technology.

The Zotac GeForce RTX 3070 Ti AMP Extreme Holo is positioned a notch above the RTX 3070 Ti AMP Holo (reviewed here). You get all of the aesthetic uplift of the Holo, but with even higher clock speeds of 1890 MHz GPU Boost compared to the 1830 MHz of the AMP Holo and 1770 MHz NVIDIA reference. The new AMP Extreme Holo is also based on a completely different PCB than the AMP Holo. This new board spans almost the entire length of the card, pulls power from three (!) power connectors (8+8+6 pin), and uses a massive 18-phase VRM to power the card. Although visually similar-looking, the AMP Extreme Holo also comes with a meatier cooling solution with eight heat-pipes. You get the same groovy-looking Holo RGB LED lighting element. There are other enthusiast-relevant bits, such as consolidated voltage measurement points, and dual BIOS, which the vanilla AMP Holo lacks. In this review, we take the card for a spin. Pricing isn't available from Zotac, but given current market conditions, we're expecting a price of around $1200.

Packaging

The Card

At first glance, the card follows Zotac's GeForce 30 AMP Holo design theme almost exactly. The colors on the card are black with various shades of gray. Running along the top edge is a Spectra RGB lighting element, which creates amazing RGB effects. On the back, you'll find a high-quality metal backplate that curves into the sides.


Dimensions of the card are 35.5 x 15 cm, and it weighs 1864 g. This is a very long card; please be aware of the dimensions and check if it will fit your case.


Installation requires three slots in your system.


Display connectivity options include three standard DisplayPort 1.4a and one HDMI 2.1. The DisplayPort 1.4a outputs support Display Stream Compression (DSC) 1.2a, which lets you connect 4K displays at 120 Hz and 8K displays at 60 Hz. Ampere can drive two 8K displays at 60 Hz with just one cable per display.

Ampere is the first GPU to support HDMI 2.1, which increases bandwidth to 48 Gbps to support higher resolutions, like 4K144 and 8K30, with a single cable. With DSC, this goes up to 4K240 and 8K120. NVIDIA's new NVENC/NVDEC video engine is optimized to handle video tasks with minimal CPU load. The highlight here is added support for AV1 decode. Just like on Turing, you may also decode MPEG-2, VC1, VP8, VP9, H.264, and H.265 natively, at up to 8K@12-bit.

The encoder is identical to Turing. It supports H.264, H.265, and lossless at up to 8K@10-bit.


Zotac has equipped their card with a dual-BIOS feature; the two BIOS chips are clearly recognizable on the board. Unlike all other vendors, Zotac doesn't provide a physical BIOS switch. Rather, you have to install the Zotac Firestorm software to toggle between the default "Performance" BIOS and a secondary "Quiet" BIOS.


Unlike the NVIDIA Founders Edition card that uses a 12-pin power input, Zotac sticks to industry standard PCIe power inputs, using a 8+8+6 configuration. Combined with PCIe slot power, this configuration is rated for 450 W. When unpacking the card, you're greeted by a sticker on the power plugs that makes it crystal clear that you're supposed to use three separate power cables.


Zotac has been including this "super cap" for a while on some of their high-end graphics cards. It's a capacitor with extra-large capacity that can store energy and release it quickly, which is supposed to help smoothen out GPU voltage. We tested it a few years ago, and it made no noticeable difference in anything (including overclocking) even though the smoother voltage can be measured with the proper equipment.

If this really makes any difference other than looking super shiny, other graphics card vendors would have certainly picked up on the technology.


The GeForce RTX 3070 Ti doesn't support multi-GPU.

Teardown

Zotac's thermal solution uses eight heatpipes. The main heatsink not only cools the GPU, but also provides cooling for memory chips and VRM circuitry. The thermal pads on the VRM are 2.3 mm thick, and those on the memory are 2.0 mm thick.


The backplate is made out of metal and protects the card against damage during installation and handling. The thermal pads for the memory chips on the back are 4.0 mm thick.


As you can see, a lot of space is wasted near the end of the card for a plastic cooler shroud that really doesn't add anything except to make the card longer, which complicates installation in some cases.

High-resolution PCB Pictures

These pictures are for the convenience of volt modders and people who would like to see all the finer details on the PCB. Feel free to link back to us and use these in your articles, videos or forum posts.



High-res versions are also available (front, back).

Circuit Board (PCB) Analysis

The GPU VRM is 16-phase, controlled by a UPI uP9512R voltage controller.


The GPU VRM uses AOZ5311NQI DrMOS components by Alpha & Omega Semiconductor, rated for 55 A.


Memory voltage uses a two-phase design and is generated by an uPI uP1666Q controller.


For memory, OnSemi ON3103 and ON3107 chips are used.


The GDDR6X memory chips are made by Micron and carry the model number D8BWW, which decodes to MT61K256M32JE-19G:T. They are specified to run at 1188 MHz (19 Gbps GDDR6X effective).


NVIDIA's GA104 graphics processor is the company's third Ampere architecture chip, the second one targeted at GeForce gamers. It is produced on a 8 nanometer process at Samsung and has a transistor count of 17.4 billion with a die size of 392 mm².