Packaging

The Card

Zotac's white AMP Edition looks great if you fancy a different color theme than the usual gray/black/metal. On the back, you'll find a plastic backplate.


Dimensions of the card are 23.5 x 14 cm, and it weighs 796 g.


Installation requires two slots in your system.


Display connectivity includes three standard DisplayPort 1.4 and one HDMI 2.1.

The DisplayPort 1.4a outputs support Display Stream Compression (DSC) 1.2a, which lets you connect 4K displays at 120 Hz and 8K displays at 60 Hz. Ampere can drive two 8K displays at 60 Hz with just one cable per display.

Ampere is the first GPU to support HDMI 2.1, which increases bandwidth to 48 Gbps to support higher resolutions, like 4K144 and 8K30, with a single cable. With DSC, this goes up to 4K240 and 8K120. NVIDIA's new NVENC/NVDEC video engine is optimized to handle video tasks with minimal CPU load. The highlight here is added support for AV1 decode. Just like on Turing, you may also decode MPEG-2, VC1, VP8, VP9, H.264, and H.265 natively, at up to 8K@12-bit.

The encoder is identical to Turing. It supports H.264, H.265, and lossless at up to 8K@10-bit.


The card has two 8-pin power inputs. This configuration is rated for up to 375 W of power draw. Due to the recessed design, plugging in the power connectors is incredibly difficult—isn't there a better solution?


The GeForce RTX 3060 does not support SLI. Only the RTX 3090 has very limited SLI support.

Teardown

Zotac's heatsink uses five heatpipes to keep the card cool. There's also cooling for the memory chips and voltage regulation circuitry.


The backplate is made out of plastic and protects the card against damage during installation and handling. Note how it wraps around a bit, which gives the card a more industrial look and feel.