The ZOTAC GTX 1080 Ti AMP! Extreme is the company's new flagship GTX 1080 Ti. It comes with a large overclock out of the box, which turns into a 7% performance uplift over the GTX 1080 Ti Founders Edition at 4K. This makes the card 44% faster than the GTX 1080 and roughly 80% faster than the GTX 1070, R9 Fury X, and GTX 980 Ti. With such numbers, the GTX 1080 Ti is a great option for 4K gaming as it is able to deliver 60 FPS at the highest settings in most of our titles. It's nice to see that Zotac has also overclocked the memory chips for a little bit of extra performance - something many other board partners don't do even though the chips can easily take it.

Zotac's large triple-slot, triple-fan cooler is mostly built from metal, which gives the card an ultra-high quality feel, but also makes the card more heavy. The cooler uses six heatpipes and delivers excellent temperatures with only 69°C, which is far from the NVIDIA thermal cutoff of 83°C. It also includes a crucial feature, which is idle-fan-stop, something that's sadly missing from the NVIDIA Founders Edition. It provides a perfect noise-free experience during desktop work, Internet browsing, and even light gaming. Gaming fan noise is improved over the reference design, but with 36 dBA, it is higher than on other competing custom boards, like the ASUS STRIX and Gigabyte Xtreme Gaming. To me, it seems as though ZOTAC prioritized lower temperatures a bit more than low noise levels.

Power consumption of Pascal is amazing, and the GTX 1080 Ti is no exception. The overclocking and board design changes by ZOTAC did reduce overall efficiency, though, which is roughly 15% worse than with the NVIDIA GTX 1080 Ti Founders Edition. Some of that is as expected due to the overclock out of the box, and around 290 W during gaming should be no problem anyway. The good thing is that this means upgrading the power input configuration from 6+8 to 8+8 was a justified move and is not just for show like we've seen on other cards. Zotac's card also has one of the most powerful VRMs available on any custom design, but with the NVIDIA GPU not benefiting much from additional voltage I'm not sure if the investment justifies the gains.

The ZOTAC GTX 1080 Ti AMP! Extreme is currently available online at a price point of $760, which is $60 more than the NVIDIA Founders Edition pricing. Considering that's a price increase of 8.5%, and the card gains 7% of extra performance out of the box thanks to its overclock, you're almost breaking even if you just look at the performance numbers. You also get a better cooler, better temperatures, and improved noise levels. Compared to other premium GTX 1080 Tis, the price is similar, maybe $10 too high.