It looks like ZOTAC did the right thing partnering up with Zalman. At about 5% faster, the GeForce GTX 480 Amp! Edition offers a solid performance improvement over NVIDIA's reference design. Thanks to the VF3000 thermal solution from Zalman this doesn't mean that the card overheats or has to be noisy like a leafblower to handle the heat. When compared to the reference design, ZOTAC's latest card is about 20°C cooler. That alone is certainly impressive, but I would have liked to see some of that temperature improvement to go into reduced fan noise. It also seems to me that ZOTAC overlooked adjusting the idle fan settings for the new cooler. In idle the card is way too noisy, which is unacceptable in my opinion. The design choice to use three slots in the system makes perfect sense for a card like the GTX 480, but it also means that users planning to use SLI are more limited in their motherboard choice than with a card that uses two slots.
Despite being overclocked out of the box, we could squeeze another 6% overclock out of the card and I'm sure more is possible with an increase in GPU voltage. Remember, you have 20°C of extra temperature headroom thanks to the Zalman cooler. Also, when looking at the maximum overclock vs. that of the reference design we saw a substantial increase in maximum clock. The reference design managed 770 MHz, the AMP! edition 800 MHz. While it might be possible that we got a lucky sample, ZOTAC tells us that AMP! Edition cards are screened for better overclocking potential.
Last but not least, ZOTAC asks a very reasonable $529 for their card, in a time where other companies want $549 or more for less potent offerings. All these little improvements can not conceal that a GF100 GPU is at work in the AMP! Edition. The card draws much more power than the latest cards from ATI, especially when idle or during media playback. When considering only price/performance there are also many cards that give you more bang for the buck. But overall, ZOTAC did a decent job with their AMP! Edition, and I still have hope that a BIOS update can optimize the fan speeds.