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Zotac recently announced its flagship graphics card – the RTX 3090 AMP Extreme Holo – and today we have put it through its paces.
Part of what makes this card ‘extreme' is its power target, which has been raised by 20% – up to 420W – compared to the RTX 3090's reference spec. That has allowed for a 120MHz factory overclock on the AMP Extreme Holo, making it the fastest of the three RTX 3090s we have tested as part of this review – the others being the Gigabyte Eagle OC and the ASUS TUF Gaming.
In the real world though, the differences in gaming performance are not big. We saw up to a 5% lead for the AMP Extreme Holo versus the Gigabyte Eagle OC, but it did vary as low as 2%. In most games, the frame rate was typically just 2-3FPS higher at 4K resolution. It seems rather unlikely that these minor differences would be noticeable in the real world.
As a result of that high power draw, Zotac's cooler does struggle to dissipate the extra heat being generated. To be clear, it is still doing absolutely fine, maintaining sub-80C temperatures using the default Amplify BIOS. However, compared to the ASUS TUF Gaming, it is running 10C hotter. When manually lowering the power draw for the AMP Extreme Holo down to 350W, to match the TUF Gaming, it ran significantly cooler, peaking at 69C, a reduction of 9C versus stock – while operating clock speed only fell by 80MHz, too.
Noise levels are also quite high in the card's out of the box state, hitting up to 47dBA using the Amplify BIOS. To my mind, Zotac's decision to bump up the power draw has backfired slightly – it takes a lot of cooling power to deal with a 420W GPU, and I think that shows when looking at the thermal and noise results. If Zotac had stuck with a 350W power target, we would be looking at a much cooler and quieter running card.
One other thing worth pointing out is the dual-BIOS situation. The card does have dual-BIOS – an Amplify (performance) BIOS and a Quiet BIOS. However, it is only possible to switch between the BIOS using Zotac's FireStorm software as there isn't a physical switch on the card. This may sound useful as you don't have to open up your case every time you want to switch BIOS modes, but surely one of the key benefits to dual-BIOS is you can manually flick a switch and change BIOS if you brick one – that's not possible here.
Additionally, the only difference switching between the Amplify and Quiet BIOS is the fan speed, so I'm not sure why a user wouldn't just manually change the fan speed instead of switching BIOS, which itself requires a system restart.
There are definitely some plus points for the AMP Extreme Holo though. I really like the clean RGB implementation, and it's possible to add an external strip that is controlled directly by the card, so no need for another RGB controller. It's memory temperatures are also joint-best of the three RTX 3090s we tested, on par with the Gigabyte Eagle OC.
For a flagship card though, I do feel we needed to see a bit more from the Zotac RTX 3090 AMP Extreme Holo. It's ultimately a decent card, but I was hoping for more impressive thermal results, especially considering the ASUS TUF Gaming runs both cooler and quieter, and that's ASUS ‘entry-level' graphics series.
We found it listed on Overclockers UK for £2399.99 HERE – making it the joint-most expensive RTX 3090 currently sold by OCUK (at the time of writing.)
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Pros
- Stylish and well-diffused RGB lighting.
- Solid memory temperatures.
- On-board RGB header to connect external LED strip etc.
- Faster than the other two RTX 3090s tested.
Cons
- High power draw hurts thermals and noise levels.
- Dual-BIOS is limited in its utility.
- Physically massive.
- £2400.
KitGuru says: I think it looks great and love the RGB implementation, but the AMP Extreme Holo suffers due to its high power draw.
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