This whole review was conducted under the assumption that ZOTAC would fix the bad contact between cooler and GPU that was present on my sample (check page 1). Let's hope that the changes by ZOTAC will provide similar cooling performance, otherwise large portions of this review will be invalidated. Apparently nobody at ZOTAC tested the card before sending it to me, they would have spotted the card running at 100°C, with fan at full blast. ZOTAC's GTX 670 AMP! Edition is based on an unmodified NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680 PCB paired with ZOTAC's large dual-fan triple slot cooler. In order to maximize this potential, ZOTAC added a massive overclock out of the box, making it the highest-clocked GTX 670 tested today. This helps the card overtake the GeForce GTX 680, clocking in at 3% faster than NVIDIA's single-GPU flagship. Compared to the GTX 670, we see 9% performance increase, which is quite impressive.
ZOTAC's triple slot cooler has big potential, but the implementation doesn't do it justice. While temperatures are low, fan noise is just technically "better", when compared to NVIDIA's cheap dual slot reference cooler. It's nowhere near what ASUS has managed to achieve with their dual-slot GTX 670 DC II, that bagged a perfect ten score in our review. I think ZOTAC should have focused on a better balance between noise and temperature; reducing temperature too far suffers from diminishing returns at the cost of much higher fan speed.
Overclocking on the other hand works better than on any GTX 670 tested today, thanks to the unmodified GTX 680 PCB. The differences are not that big though and translate into less than 1% real life performance difference between all our samples, when manually OC'd to the max.
With a price of $439, the ZOTAC AMP! Edition is also the most expensive card reviewed today. It does not include the Assassin's Creed triple game bundle the GTX 680 AMP! had. Justifying the extra cost for the higher overclock and overclocking potential seems difficult, but it's not an unreasonable price increase, especially since you get the much more expensive GTX 680 PCB.