Zotac GeForce RTX 3070 Ti AMP Holo Review

Name: Zotac GeForce RTX 3070 Ti AMP Holo
Brand: ZOTAC

W1zzard

on Jun 9th, 2021,

in Graphics Cards.

Manufacturer: ZOTAC

(3 Comments) »

Introduction

The Zotac GeForce RTX 3070 Ti AMP Holo is the company's premium custom-design offering based on NVIDIA's latest addition to its RTX 30-series "Ampere" product family. The GeForce RTX 3070 Ti and last week's RTX 3080 Ti are additions to the higher-end of NVIDIA's product stack, in response to competition from AMD's Radeon RX 6000 series "Big Navi" graphics cards. The RTX 3070 Ti in particular is being launched to close the price-performance gap between the RTX 3070 and RTX 3080, as the RTX 3070 is embattled on two fronts, from the RX 6700 XT and RX 6800.

NVIDIA could have been lazy by simply cutting down its latest GA102 silicon, but was prudent instead. Rather, the company decided not only to max out the GA104 silicon, unlocking all of its 6,144 CUDA cores, but also gave the chip 35% faster 19 Gbps GDDR6X memory, as opposed to the 14 Gbps GDDR6 on the original RTX 3070. Combined with the slightly higher clock speeds and power limits, these changes could be NVIDIA's answer to AMD competitors.

The GeForce "Ampere" architecture represents the second generation of NVIDIA's RTX real-time raytracing technology, and introduces second-generation RT cores that double ray intersection performance and feature fixed-function hardware for even more raytraced effects, third-generation Tensor cores that leverage the sparsity phenomenon in AI deep-learning neural nets to increase inference performance by an order of magnitude, and the Ampere CUDA core itself, which significantly increases performance by leveraging concurrent INT32 and FP32 math operations.

The Zotac RTX 3070 Ti AMP Holo features the company's highest state of tune for this GPU. The chip runs at a boost frequency of 1830 MHz boost, compared to the 1770 MHz reference. The HoloBlack cooling solution combines the cooling prowess of a large triple-fan aluminium fin-stack heatsink with the aesthetics of a large ARGB LED diffuser the company dubbed "Spectra lighting system." In this review, we show you if it's worth forking out a little extra for this card over the Founders Edition.

GeForce RTX 3070 Ti Market Segment Analysis
	Price	Cores	ROPs	Core Clock	Boost Clock	Memory Clock	GPU	Transistors	Memory
RX 5700 XT	$370	2560	64	1605 MHz	1755 MHz	1750 MHz	Navi 10	10300M	8 GB, GDDR6, 256-bit
RTX 2070	$340	2304	64	1410 MHz	1620 MHz	1750 MHz	TU106	10800M	8 GB, GDDR6, 256-bit
RTX 3060	$900	3584	48	1320 MHz	1777 MHz	1875 MHz	GA106	13250M	12 GB, GDDR6, 192-bit
RTX 2070 Super	$450	2560	64	1605 MHz	1770 MHz	1750 MHz	TU104	13600M	8 GB, GDDR6, 256-bit
Radeon VII	$680	3840	64	1400 MHz	1800 MHz	1000 MHz	Vega 20	13230M	16 GB, HBM2, 4096-bit
RTX 2080	$600	2944	64	1515 MHz	1710 MHz	1750 MHz	TU104	13600M	8 GB, GDDR6, 256-bit
RTX 2080 Super	$690	3072	64	1650 MHz	1815 MHz	1940 MHz	TU104	13600M	8 GB, GDDR6, 256-bit
RTX 3060 Ti	$1300	4864	80	1410 MHz	1665 MHz	1750 MHz	GA104	17400M	8 GB, GDDR6, 256-bit
RX 6700 XT	$1000	2560	64	2424 MHz	2581 MHz	2000 MHz	Navi 22	17200M	12 GB, GDDR6, 192-bit
RTX 2080 Ti	$1400	4352	88	1350 MHz	1545 MHz	1750 MHz	TU102	18600M	11 GB, GDDR6, 352-bit
RTX 3070	$1300	5888	96	1500 MHz	1725 MHz	1750 MHz	GA104	17400M	8 GB, GDDR6, 256-bit
RTX 3070 Ti	$1300 MSRP: $600	6144	96	1575 MHz	1770 MHz	1188 MHz	GA104	17400M	8 GB, GDDR6X, 256-bit
Zotac RTX 3070 Ti AMP Holo	$1350	6144	96	1575 MHz	1830 MHz	1188 MHz	GA104	17400M	8 GB, GDDR6X, 256-bit
RX 6800	$1400	3840	96	1815 MHz	2105 MHz	2000 MHz	Navi 21	26800M	16 GB, GDDR6, 256-bit
RX 6800 XT	$1700	4608	128	2015 MHz	2250 MHz	2000 MHz	Navi 21	26800M	16 GB, GDDR6, 256-bit
RTX 3080	$1500	8704	96	1440 MHz	1710 MHz	1188 MHz	GA102	28000M	10 GB, GDDR6X, 320-bit
RTX 3080 Ti	$2200	10240	112	1365 MHz	1665 MHz	1188 MHz	GA102	28000M	12 GB, GDDR6X, 384-bit

Packaging

The Card

The Zotac RTX 3070 Ti AMP Holo features a traditional triple-slot, triple-fan cooling solution design, but with a touch of modernity from its Spectra RGB lighting element along the top. Other modern touches include the 3-D backplate that curves into the sides.

Dimensions of the card are 32 x 12.5 cm, and it weighs 1254 g.

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.

Power is drawn from two 8-pin PCIe power connectors. This configuration, along with slot power, supplies up to 375 W.

The GeForce RTX 3070 Ti does not support SLI.

Teardown

Compared to the NVIDIA Founders Edition card, the Zotac AMP Holo is easy to take apart. Simply undo a bunch of screws on the backplate. The thermal pads for the memory chips are 2.0 mm thick, and those for the VRM are 2.5 mm thick.

The cooling solution uses a pair of aluminium fin stacks, skewered by six 8 mm-thick copper heat pipes that make contact with the GPU through a copper base that also pulls heat from the memory chips.

The 3-D backplate has thermal pads (3.0 mm) lend a hand with cooling, as well as an ARGB ornament.

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.