Zotac GTX 580 AMP²! Review

The box artwork is identical to the AMP! Edition we reviewed last week. Zotac do love the orange firebreathing dragon.

Inside, the bundle is good. There is a free copy of the excellent Assassins Creed: Brotherhood as well as a software disc, installation literature and various power and output converters (DVI Adapter, Mini HDMI to HDMI adapter and 2x PCI Express power cables).

The custom cooler from Zotac looks stunning. They are calling it the ‘Dual Turbine VGA cooler' and it is marked as ‘ZF3000' underneath their logo in the center. It is built around a black PCB which also looks great.

The GTX580 can work in up to quad SLI formations for enhanced performance and image quality settings.

The card is shipped with two DVI ports and an HDMI port, with the supplied adapter you can hook this directly into an HDMI TV or monitor. As we have said before, the GTX580 is seriously outperformed on a connectivity level by the AMD solutions, such as the HD6970 which can support up to 6 monitors. This card can only handle two screens at the same time. If you want to use three screens, be prepared to buy two of these cards.

The HDMI interface is 1.3 compatible which offers DTS-HD, Dolby TrueHD, AC-3, DTS and 7.1 channel audio support. It also has support for HDMI 1.4 3D output.

Like the reference design card it requires a 6 pin and an 8 pin PCI E power connector to operate properly.

The cooler design is quite stunning. The copper block is fed into several heatpipes which travel the full length of the PCB and are then cooled by the dual fans residing above.

The cooler pokes through to the reverse side of the PCB and is then locked in place by the specialised screws.

An overview of the hardware in GPUz.

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