Packaging

The Card

The Zotac Twin Edge is the most compact custom design we're reviewing today. It is of standard PCIe slot height, which will be useful in height-limited cases.


Dimensions of the card are 22.5 x 11.5 cm, and it weighs 644 g.


Installation requires two slots in your system.


Display connectivity options include three standard DisplayPort 1.4a and one HDMI 2.1. Interestingly, the USB-C port for VR headsets, which NVIDIA introduced on the Turing Founders Editions, has been removed—guess it didn't take off as planned. 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.


Unlike the Founders Edition, which uses the NVIDIA 12-pin power connector, Zotac uses standard PCIe power plugs. The card uses one 8-pin power input, which is specified to provide up to 225 W.


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

Teardown

Zotac's thermal solution uses four heatpipes. The main heatsink not only cools the GPU, but also provides cooling for memory chips and VRM circuitry.


The backplate is made out of metal and protects the card against damage during installation and handling. Note how it partially wraps around the card, which is nice.