Introduction

It has been two months since NVIDIA launched their GeForce GTX 480 Series. Now, ZOTAC has unveiled their GTX 480 Amp! Edition that uses a non-reference air cooling solution. At this time the PCB design remains unchanged, but ZOTAC has increased the clock speeds to 756 MHz GPU and 950 MHz memory. This change should bring a healthy performance increase. ZOTAC also claims to use a special binning process which selects better overclocking cards to be used as AMP! Edition. Together with the customized Zalman VF3000 cooler the triple slot card promises to handle the increased heat without issues - has Zotac tamed the GeForce GTX 480 with an equally beastly cooler?

Packaging

ZOTAC's package has a little hole on the front through which you can see the top of the card. The back has further general information about the card with info in multiple languages.

Contents

You will receive:

• Graphics card
• Driver CD + Quick Install Guide
• NVIDIA Tech Demo CD
• Mini-HDMI to HDMI adapter
• DVI to VGA adapter
• 2x PCI-Express power cables

The Card

ZOTAC has chosen to use the Zalman VF3000 on their card featuring a customized design for ZOTAC. The PCB is unchanged from the GeForce GTX 480 reference design.


The GTX 480 Amp! Edition is the first GTX 400 card that uses three slots in your system. This approach enables the use of a bigger cooling solution promising better cooling performance.


The card has two DVI ports and one one mini-HDMI port. Unlike AMD's latest GPUs, the output logic design is not as flexible. On AMD cards vendors are free to combine six TMDS links into any output configuration they want (dual-link DVI consuming two links), from what we know so far, on NVIDIA, you are fixed to two DVI outputs and one HDMI/DP in addition to that. NVIDIA confirmed that you can use only two displays at the same time, so for a three monitor setup you would need two cards.

NVIDIA has included an HDMI sound device inside their GPU which does away with the requirement of connecting an external audio source to the card for HDMI audio. The HDMI interface is HDMI 1.3a compatible which includes Dolby TrueHD, DTS-HD, AC-3, DTS and up to 7.1 channel audio with 192 kHz / 24-bit. NVIDIA also claims full support for the 3D portion of the HDMI 1.4 specification which will become important later this year when we will see first Blu-Ray titles shipping with support for 3D output.


You may combine up to four GTX 480 cards in SLI for added performance or improved image quality settings. Given the three slot design of the GTX 480 it seems unlikely you can find a motherboard that will fit four of these beasts.


Here are the front and the back of the card, high-res versions are also available (front, back). If you choose to use these images for voltmods etc, please include a link back to this site or let us post your article.