NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 3080 has been on the market for several months now, and it is probably the most popular graphics card launched in recent months owing to its impressive performance that finally makes playable 4K a reality. Zotac's RTX 3080 AMP Holo is the company's most premium RTX 3080 SKU, sitting a notch above the various Trinity variants. Traditionally, "AMP" has been Zotac's overclocking-focused variant, but for this generation, "Holo" has been added to the name to make it crystal clear that the card supports RGB lighting effects, or as Zotac writes on their website, "an inspiring electroplated workmanship on a translucent flourish. A unique design embracing an iridescent holographic finish that will captivate the eye with the shifts of color across the spectrum in stillness". Yup, yup, indeed. I'm sure it would be fine without all that fluff, too. The RGB lighting effects on the AMP Holo actually look really nice even when the lighting is turned off because of the green-to-purple lacquer on the RGB panel.

Out of the box, the AMP Holo is rated for a boost clock of 1770 MHz, 60 MHz higher than the NVIDIA Founders Edition, or 3.5%. Unfortunately, I have to report that the card consistently ended up slightly slower than the Founders Edition. This not only shows on my game benchmarks, but also in our GPU clock frequency analysis, where the average GPU clock was 1841 MHz—NVIDIA's Founders Edition reached 1931 MHz. I've reported this to Zotac, and they replaced my sample with another card, only to find the same results. According to Zotac, they don't see any issue, and the card operates within normal parameters. While this technically means that the card doesn't reach its advertised performance, we're talking about a few percent here, which really isn't worth losing a lot of sleep about, especially in current market conditions. Still, I'd be curious to learn the underlying reason for the loss in performance. The card definitely does not overheat, and the board power limit is actually higher than the Founders Edition.

Anyway, averaged over our whole game suite at 4K resolution, the Zotac RTX 3080 AMP Holo is still 5% faster than AMD's Radeon RX 6800 XT and only 3% behind the Radeon RX 6900 XT. NVIDIA's mighty GeForce RTX 3090 is 12% faster than the AMP Edition. Just to put things into perspective, this makes the card twice as fast as the Radeon RX 5700 XT—AMD's last-generation flagship desired by many gamers even today.

If you are looking for fluid 4K gaming, the RTX 3080 is the card you want. At lower resolutions, many games are CPU bottlenecked, though, so the card won't be able to play out its full potential. The RTX 3080 is also a good option for 1440p high refresh-rate gaming, but I definitely wouldn't spend that much money just for Full HD 1080p gaming.

Zotac's new AMP cooler is decent, clearly superior to the NVIDIA RTX 3080 Founders Edition cooler, as our new apples-to-apples heatsink testing shows. With 77°C, temperatures are a tiny bit better than the RTX 3080 FE, and noise levels are 1 dBA quieter as well. While these results are very decent indeed, there are several RTX 3080 cooler designs that are MUCH better, both in temperatures and noise levels. Some of those cards, like the ASUS TUF with a quiet BIOS and MSI Suprim X, are almost whisper-quiet at full load. Zotac's AMP Holo will be well audible in your case, but not loud in any way. Just like all other RTX 3080 cards, the AMP comes with the idle-fan-stop feature, which completely turns off the fans in idle, productivity, browsing, and video playback—the perfect noise-free experience. I have to praise Zotac for their fantastic backplate, which is made out of thick metal that definitely adds to the product's quality. I also like how the backplate wraps around the card slightly to give it a more industrial look and feel.

Overclocking the Zotac AMP Edition yielded a good average GPU clock frequency of 1989 MHz, the fourth best result of the nine RTX 3080 cards I've reviewed so far. Surprisingly, actual OC performance falls behind by a few percent—this is no doubt connected to the performance issues we saw throughout regular testing. Zotac did increase their card's default power limit by 20 W, to 340 W, and the manual adjustment range is even higher, up to 374 W. I did try raising the power limit to the 374 W maximum, but it made absolutely no difference for performance, and the card didn't even make use of the additional power, at least if we can trust the power consumption sensor readings.

The RTX 3080 is sold out everywhere, just like all other high-end cards. Originally launched at an MSRP of $700, you can now find the RTX 3080 on eBay for around $1100. Zotac's AMP Holo can be found at very similar pricing, maybe $50 higher, which makes this a great choice if you're just looking for an RTX 3080 at not-so-insane pricing and don't need the bells and whistles that other, more expensive cards offer. Especially if you're not planning on overclocking will this card do just fine. On the other hand, the card doesn't achieve the specified performance, so why not spend a bit more on a card that does? 1% of $1000 is $10, so if you can find a faster card for $50 more, then go for it, but spending $100 or $200 more is definitely not worth it when looking at FPS alone. The RTX 3080 also faces strong competition from AMD's Radeon RX 6800 XT, which offers better efficiency with comparable performance in rasterization, but falls behind in raytracing.