Introduction

The ZOTAC GeForce RTX 3090 AMP Extreme Holo is the company's most premium custom RTX 3090 card. It comes with Zotac's highest state of factory overclocking, highest power limits backed by high-grade electrical components, most elaborate air-cooling solution, and RGB aesthetic with the most LEDs. The GeForce RTX 3090 remains the fastest GeForce RTX 30-series GPU money can buy. While NVIDIA insists that the RTX 3080 Ti is its "flagship" gaming GPU, the RTX 3090 is a halo product positioned a notch above. It continues to be better endowed in every way than the RTX 3080 Ti and has double the memory amount at 24 GB, letting the card handle certain professional-visualization tasks when paired with the GeForce Studio drivers.

The GeForce RTX 3090 "Ampere" is based on NVIDIA's largest GPU, the 8 nm "GA102," which it nearly maxes out, with 10,496 CUDA cores, 328 tensor cores, 82 RT cores, and a 384-bit wide GDDR6X memory interface. The memory ticks at a blistering 19.5 Gbps data rate, giving the GPU 940 GB/s of memory bandwidth to play with. The RTX 30-series Ampere graphics architecture heralds the second generation of RTX, NVIDIA's groundbreaking technology that brings real-time raytracing to gamers by combining traditional raster 3D graphics with certain raytraced elements, such as lighting, shadows, reflections, global illumination, and with this generation, even realistic motion-blur.



Even achieving this much requires a tremendous amount of computing power. NVIDIA uses fixed-function hardware called RT cores to perform the compute-heavy tasks of raytracing, such as ray intersection and BVH. AI, accelerated by Tensor cores, is used for de-noising. CUDA cores handle everything else. Ampere debuts the second-generation RT core with double the ray intersection performance and fixed-function hardware that enables raytraced motion-blur, third-generation Tensor cores that leverage the sparsity phenomenon in deep-learning neural nets to increase AI inference performance by an order of magnitude, and a large count of Ampere CUDA cores that offer increased IPC over the previous-generation, and concurrent INT32+FP32 math.

The ZOTAC RTX 3090 AMP Holo offers the largest version of the company's IceStorm 2.0 cooling solution that comes with a set of three aluminium fin stacks skewered by a mammoth eight heat-pipes and ventilated by three 100 mm fans. Some of the airflow from the cooler goes through the card and out vents along the periphery of the card at the backplate. ZOTAC is using a triple 8-pin PCIe power connector setup, and the Boost frequencies are rated at 1815 MHz (compared to 1625 MHz reference). Overclockers are also treated with consolidated voltage-measurement points and dual-BIOS via software switching.

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 we find 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 1879 g. This is a very long card; please be aware of the dimensions, and check if it will fit your case.


See what I mean? The AMP Extreme Holo (right) is huge, noticeably bigger than even the RTX 3090 FE (2nd from right). The small cards on the left? Those are the RTX 3080 Founders Edition, Radeon RX 6800 XT and GeForce RTX 2080 Ti—not so small at all.


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 the industry standard 8-pin PCIe power inputs, but there are three of these. Combined with PCIe slot power, this configuration is rated for 525 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 8-pin 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.


On the PCB, you find measurement points for all voltages on the graphics card—very nice! Near the top edge of the photo is a silkscreen for a "SW3" switch—is this where the BIOS switch was supposed to go?


The GeForce RTX 3090 supports SLI and features a newer-generation NVLink bridge interface, which means you can't use your NVLink bridge from your Turing cards. Be warned that with Ampere, NVIDIA isn't supporting SLI as in implicit multi-GPU (SLI as you know it), but explicit multi-GPU that's developed and supported by game/application developers. With multi-GPU game support being pretty much non-existent, this basically means SLI is dead. Perhaps creative and 3D modeling applications that support explicit multi-GPU can benefit from SLI.

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 and memory are 2.5 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 3.5 mm thick.


Here you can see that 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).