The Card

Zotac has slightly changed the visual theme of their cards with the RTX 20 generation. They now use a high-gloss black theme on the front. Dimensions of the card are 31.0 x 11.5 cm.


Installation requires three slots in your system.


Display connectivity options include three standard DisplayPort 1.4a, one HDMI 2.0b, and a VirtualLink connector, which is basically USB-C with DisplayPort routing and USB-PD, so a single cable can power, display, and take input from your VR HMD.

NVIDIA has updated their display engine with the Turing microarchitecture, which now supports DisplayPort 1.4a with support for VESA's nearly lossless Display Stream Compression (DSC). Combined, this enables support for 8K@30Hz using a single cable, or 8K@60Hz when DSC is turned on. For context, DisplayPort 1.4a is the latest version of the standard that was published in April, 2018.


The board uses two 8-pin power connectors. This input configuration is specified for up to 375 watts of power draw.


With Turing, NVIDIA is using NVLink as a physical layer for its next-generation SLI technology. NVLink provides sufficient bandwidth for multi-GPU rendering at 8K 60 Hz, 4K 120 Hz, and other such bandwidth-heavy display resolutions. It's a point-to-point link between your GPUs, and so, latencies will be lower compared to pushing data through the PCI-Express bus.


We shine the light from a self-leveling line laser on to the card, which shows no sagging.

Disassembly

Zotac's cooler is using five heatpipes and a copper plate to soak up heat from the GPU quickly.


Once the main cooler is removed, a black die-cast metal baseplate becomes apparent. It provides cooling for the VRM chips and improves the card's rigidity.


The backplate is made from metal and protects the card during installation and handling.

On the next page, we dive deep into the PCB layout and VRM configuration.