Zotac GeForce RTX 3080 AMP Holo Review

Name: Zotac GeForce RTX 3080 AMP Holo
Brand: ZOTAC
Price: 1150 USD

W1zzard

on Mar 5th, 2021,

in Graphics Cards.

Manufacturer: ZOTAC

(28 Comments) »

Introduction

We have with us the Zotac GeForce RTX 3080 AMP Holo, the company's top custom-design RTX 3080 offering available in the North American market. The AMP Holo is positioned a notch above the RTX 3080 Trinity, which we had a chance to review last year. For the most part, the card retains the design of the Trinity's IceStorm 2.0 cooling solution, but with lavish use of ARGB LED illumination. The lighting is tastefully executed through a large diffuser along the top edge, and across the metal back-plate. The card also features a higher factory overclock than the RTX 3080 Trinity OC.

The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 "Ampere" is NVIDIA's current-generation flagship gaming product. Despite the existence of the faster RTX 3090, NVIDIA continues to refer to the RTX 3080 as its flagship because it fulfills everything an enthusiast-gamer would want—maxed out gaming at 4K UHD with RTX raytracing enabled. The GeForce "Ampere" graphics architecture introduces the second generation of NVIDIA's path-breaking RTX technology, which combines conventional raster 3D graphics with certain real-time raytraced elements to significantly improve realism, such as lighting, reflections, shadows, and global illumination. With 2nd Gen RTX, NVIDIA is also introducing raytraced motion blur, an extremely difficult effect to pull off in real-time, which required the company to innovate a whole new component into its 2nd Gen RT core.

The GeForce Ampere architecture combines new-generation Ampere CUDA cores that can perform concurrent INT32+FP32 math operations, 2nd Gen RT cores that double ray intersection performance over the previous generation and introduce new temporal components, and 3rd Gen Tensor cores, which leverage the sparsity phenomenon in AI DNN to accelerate building and training of neural nets by an order of magnitude. NVIDIA leverages AI for de-noising and its DLSS performance enhancement.

Based on the 8 nm "GA102" silicon, the GeForce RTX 3080 more than doubles the number of unified shaders over the previous generation RTX 2080. It packs 8,704 CUDA cores, 68 RT cores, and 272 Tensor cores. The memory amount has been increased by 25%, to 10 GB, as has the memory bus width, to 320-bit. NVIDIA and Micron Technology have innovated a whole new memory standard for the RTX 3080 and RTX 3090, which they call GDDR6X. This memory operates at a blistering data rate of 19 Gbps and helps NVIDIA hit memory bandwidth levels of 760 GB/s.

As we mentioned earlier, the Zotac GeForce RTX 3080 AMP Holo features the company's highest factory overclock available in the North American market, with the GPU Boost frequency set at 1770 MHz instead of the 1710 MHz reference. It features the company's IceStorm 2.0 cooling solution that has two large aluminium fin stacks to which heat drawn from the base is conveyed by five heat pipes. A trio of fans ventilate the cooler. The Spectra 3.0 ARGB lighting package could be the brightest spot in your gaming PC build.

GeForce RTX 3080 Market Segment Analysis
	Price	Shader Units	ROPs	Core Clock	Boost Clock	Memory Clock	GPU	Transistors	Memory
RTX 2070	$340	2304	64	1410 MHz	1620 MHz	1750 MHz	TU106	10800M	8 GB, GDDR6, 256-bit
RTX 3060	$330	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	1802 MHz	N/A	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	$700	4864	80	1410 MHz	1665 MHz	1750 MHz	GA104	17400M	8 GB, GDDR6, 256-bit
RTX 2080 Ti	$1000	4352	88	1350 MHz	1545 MHz	1750 MHz	TU102	18600M	11 GB, GDDR6, 352-bit
RTX 3070	$750	5888	96	1500 MHz	1725 MHz	1750 MHz	GA104	17400M	8 GB, GDDR6, 256-bit
RX 6800	$850	3840	96	1815 MHz	2105 MHz	2000 MHz	Navi 21	26800M	16 GB, GDDR6, 256-bit
RX 6800 XT	$1200	4608	128	2015 MHz	2250 MHz	2000 MHz	Navi 21	26800M	16 GB, GDDR6, 256-bit
RTX 3080	$1100	8704	96	1440 MHz	1710 MHz	1188 MHz	GA102	28000M	10 GB, GDDR6X, 320-bit
ZOTAC RTX 3080 AMP Holo	$1150	8704	96	1440 MHz	1770 MHz	1188 MHz	GA102	28000M	10 GB, GDDR6X, 320-bit
RX 6900 XT	$1500	5120	128	2015 MHz	2250 MHz	2000 MHz	Navi 21	26800M	16 GB, GDDR6, 256-bit
RTX 3090	$1900	10496	112	1395 MHz	1695 MHz	1219 MHz	GA102	28000M	24 GB, GDDR6X, 384-bit

Packaging

The Card

Zotac uses a metal cooler shroud paired with a metal backplate, which looks great. In terms of color theme, various shades of gray are used, and along the top edge, an RGB strip has been installed.

Dimensions of the card are 32 x 12.5 cm, and it weighs 1465 g.

Installation requires three slots in your system.

Display connectivity includes three standard DisplayPort 1.4 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.

The card has two 8-pin power inputs. This configuration is rated for up to 375 W of power draw.

GeForce RTX 3080 does not support SLI. Only the RTX 3090 has very limited SLI support.

Teardown

Zotac's large cooling solution uses seven heatpipes and a big heatsink. This main part of the cooler handles heat output from the memory chips, too.

Once the main heatsink has been removed, a secondary cooling plate becomes visible, which soaks up heat from the VRMs and provides anti-sag stability for the card.

The backplate is made out of thick metal; it's actually the best backplate I've seen in a long time. There's also some RGB lighting installed here, and thermal pads pick up a little bit of heat from the back of the PCB.

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 or forum posts.