Temperatures

Temperatures of the ZOTAC AMP! Edition are fine, thanks to the triple slot cooler. Load temps are well optimized and look like they have been designed to not exceed 80°C, which is a good thing, as NVIDIA's dynamic overclocking mechanism takes temperature into account and lowers maximum boost clocks by 13 MHz each 10°C.

Important: GPU temperature will vary depending on clocks, voltage,
cooler design and production variances. This table just serves to provide
a list of typical temperatures for similar cards, reached during TPU review.


After taking the card apart for photos and reassembling it, I noticed very high temperatures, reaching well into the 80°C range. Since I applied only a thin layer of thermal paste, the cooler was not making optimum contact. I searched for the reason, and it seems that the cooler/screw design does not put enough pressure between GPU and cooler. An easy fix was adding four washers on the GPU mounting screws, which solved the temperature problem and also resulted in a 10°C reduction of load temperatures. I notified ZOTAC of this issue and they forwarded it to their engineering department.

Clock Profiles

Modern graphics cards have several clock profiles that are selected to balance power draw and performance requirements.
The following table lists the clock settings for important performance scenarios and the GPU voltage that we measured. We measure on the pins of a coil or capacitor near the GPU voltage regulator.


The card uses NVIDIA's dynamic overclocking mechanism, which means it will dynamically adjust clock and voltage based on render load, temperature and other factors.

For the graph below, we recorded all GPU clock, GPU voltage combinations of our benchmarking suite for the 1920x1200 resolution. The plotted points have transparency, so they can add up to indicate more often used values. A light color means the clock/voltage combination is rarely used, a dark color means it's active a lot.