Here, there be dragons. Zotac Dragons!
Just like the maps of old, back when the world was assumed to be flat and the direct centre of the entire universe, this card has a dragon on it. Not just any dragon, but a fire-breathing monster with a honeycombed background - a cute visual metaphor for the impressive overclock on this beastie.
It's called the AMP edition for a reason, as Zotac grabbed the GTX285 reference design and bumped the clocks up a notch. They've added 54MHz on the core, 54MHz on the memory and 36MHz to the shaders. This should prove to be a significant increase in benchies, but we'll get to that in a minute.
Physically the card is the same as the reference model, with a large plastic shell covering the cooling inside. It's got a large squirrel-cage fan that sucks in air and idles at 57.6dBA, with a load noise of 70.6 to keep it cool. Temps are a nice 46 degrees Celsius at idle, topping 70 under load.
A large copper base with a series of heatpipes provides the contact with the honestly massive GPU core (see 'Tyrannosaurus GTX'), and takes the heat away to the thick aluminium fins. These dissipate the heat into the air, which then moves out the back of the card, and out of the case. Not only do they provide a good heat transfer system, but the fins run the length of the card and also make it physically strong, not bending or flexing like some longer cards. The card needs two 6-pin PCIe power connectors as well as the PCIe bus, but this is average for an enthusiast card.
Tyrannosaurus GTXThe GT200 core is a massively monolithic monster, with a die size of 470mm² and a bloody huge 1400 million transistors used. Not only is it physically large, but it's also proving difficult to get high yields on, giving NVIDIA some money troubles. Still, it's what we're stuck with until the next NVIDIA core, rumoured for later in '09.
Based around the GT200 core at a 55nm process, it's got one gigabyte of GDDR3 memory on a 512-bit memory bus, giving plenty of memory bandwidth and especially so when the overclocked memory speed is taken into account. This core is compatible with PhysX and CUDA, though the former will give you a slight performance hit.
This is essentially the same card as the GTX280, and has simply been shrunk down an extra 10nm while getting a nice increase in clockspeed. We couldn't push the core much further at all - it's already at the max stable memory, but we got to 720MHz on the core and 1550MHz on the shader.
Two DVI ports and an analogue video out are next to the vented PCI bracket, with the power status LED also here - it will light up green if you've got power in correctly, and red if you don't. Of course, the card won't work without power (making this kind of redundant), but for those who aren't tech-savvy it might have some attraction. The usual two SLI nipples are at the top of the card, allowing up to three GTX285s to be used together for a decent performance boost.
Bundled with the card is a full copy of GRID, which is an excellent choice and a great game - the more people who can get it the better. Not only that, but Zotac has also thrown in a copy of 3DMark Vantage Advanced, worth $US20, and if you register the card online within two weeks of buying it you'll even get an extra chunk of warranty on top - up to five years of it! For a pre-overclocked card with a great bundle and performance higher across the board (except Crysis, down by half a frame on average) this really is a nice choice.
Issue: 133 | February, 2012