Introduction

Back in September, NVIDIA launched its GeForce RTX 20-series graphics card family with the RTX 2080 and RTX 2080 Ti. Close to a month later, the company launched its third-fastest card in the family, the GeForce RTX 2070. This is an important product for NVIDIA because even at a relatively steep price of $500, it is the most affordable one offering real-time ray tracing in games, or at least a semblance of it. The RTX 2070 is being offered to the vast bulk of gamers that play at 1440p resolution or lower.

NVIDIA has also made certain interesting design choices for the RTX 2070. Predecessors of this card, such as the GTX 1070 and GTX 970, have been based on the same chips as the SKU just above them, such as the GTX 1080 and GTX 980. NVIDIA is basing the RTX 2070 on its third-largest "Turing" chip, the TU106, instead of the TU104.



It's important to mention here, though, that the TU106 isn't exactly a successor of chips in the same way as the GP106 or GM206. While those two have exactly half the muscle of the GP104 or GM204 respectively, the TU106 has half the muscle of the top-dog TU102 instead of the TU104. This chip also gets the same 256-bit wide GDDR6 memory interface, which is unchanged from the TU104. The philosophy behind the TU106 may have been to design a lean chip that is cheaper to build for the simple fact that it has a smaller die than the TU104.

Today, we have for review the Zotac GeForce RTX 2070 AMP Extreme, which is the company's flagship RTX 2070 variant. It is built on a custom PCB with revamped VRM circuitry and upgraded power input capability. The clocks have been increased significantly, to 1860 MHz Boost, which is 110 MHz higher than the NVIDIA Founders Edition. ZOTAC also upgraded the cooler to a large triple-slot triple-fan solution with a 8+6 power input configuration.

The Zotac RTX 2070 AMP Extreme is currently available online for $640.