Packaging

The Card

While most other GeForce RTX 40 cards are focusing on edgy designs with sharp corners, Zotac is taking an all-smooth approach. 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.


Even compared with the Founders Edition, which is already pretty big, the Zotac card is even larger.


Dimensions of the card are 36.0 x 15.0 cm, and it weighs 2044 g.


Installation requires four slots in your system.


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


Just like the Founder Edition, 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 4x PCIe 8-pin is included, you can also run the card with just three 8-pins.

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

Zotac's thermal solution is huge and combines a vapor-chamber baseplate with nine heatpipes. The main heatsink also provides cooling for the memory chips and VRM circuitry.


I noticed that the cooler doesn't make ideal contact with the memory chips on two sides. It seems that the vapor-chamber base is a little bit too small to cover the memory chips completely. The fact that the thermal pads were positioned slightly away from the edge didn't help either. With 76°C (82°C in quiet mode) memory temperatures are still perfectly fine, even though they are 4-6°C higher than on other RTX 4090 cards. Still MUCH better than the 100+°C that we saw on some GeForce 30 cards.


The backplate is made of metal and protects the card against damage during installation and handling, while also providing some structural integrity.