Packaging

The Card

Zotac is taking an all-smooth approach with their GeForce RTX 4080 AMP Extreme. The curves on their card are almost female-elegant. On the back you get a high-quality metal backplate, the front cooler shroud is made from plastic.


Zotac's RGB illumination is amazing and mesmerizing. They have integrated a large lighting element along the top edge. There's more lighting at the bottom and an additional illumination zone on the backplate.


Dimensions of the card are 36.0 x 15.0 cm, and it weighs 1962 g.


Installation requires three slots in your system.


Display connectivity includes three standard DisplayPort 1.4a ports and one HDMI 2.1a (same technology as Ampere).

NVIDIA introduced the concept of dual NVDEC and NVENC Codecs with the Ada architecture. This means there are two independent sets of hardware-accelerators; so you can encode and decode two streams of video in parallel or one stream at double the FPS rate. The new 8th Gen NVENC now accelerates AV1 encoding, besides HEVC. You also get an "optical flow accelerator" unit that is able to calculate intermediate frames for videos, to smooth playback. The same hardware unit is used for frame generation in DLSS 3.


The card uses the new 12+4 pin ATX 12VHPWR connector, which is rated for up to 600 W of power draw. An adapter cable from 3x PCIe 8-pin is included (which is rated for up to 450 W). Of course the 4x 8-pin to 16-pin adapter cables from RTX 4090 will also work with the RTX 4080, but the card won't need that much power.

Right next to the power connector you find the dual BIOS switch which lets you toggle between the default performance BIOS and a secondary quiet BIOS. Interestingly, Zotac chose to use a push button instead of a physical switch, which means you can only switch between the two when the card is powered up. Only power is sufficient, no need to go into BIOS or Windows, there's no need to install any software. After pressing the button, the RGB lights will flash red for performance BIOS and blue for quiet BIOS. The setting is saved between reboots and power offs, so no complaints from me.

Teardown

Unlike the Zotac RTX 4090 AMP Extreme AIRO, the RTX 4080 doesn't use a vapor-chamber, but a classic baseplate. There's also nine heatpipes installed to move heat away quickly from the GPU, to the heatsink. The main cooler also provides cooling for the VRM and memory chips.


The backplate is made of metal and protects the card against damage during installation and handling.