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After showing off their new Nvidia GeForce GTX 980 Ti Series in Taipai, we were too excited to upgrade the aging GTX 680 in one of our test benches. Thanks to Zotac, we lucked out and today we are looking at the Zotac GeForce GTX 970 AMP! Omega Core Edition Graphics Card.
WHY DO I WANT A GRAPHICS CARD?
We posted an article describing the who, what, when, where, why and how of graphics cards. If you are new to the graphics card market and are looking to further your knowledge of graphics cards then we encourage you to start your journey there. Simply put, a graphics card is a dedicated piece of hardware that is situated in the PCI Express bus interface found on your motherboard. This powerful device supplies a dedicated source of processing power to generate the graphics that will fill your monitor with exceptional 3D quality.
PACKAGING, PRICING AND SPECIFICATIONS
The Zotac GeForce GTX 970 AMP! Omega Core Edition comes in your typical graphics card packaging, which features a basic overview of the card on the front side of the packaging, and a quick outline of its main features on the back.
This is of course a non-reference card, meaning it features a custom designed cooler by Zotac (more on that later), and of course it also comes overclocked from the factory. That overclock consists of a 1152MHz base clock, and a 1304MHz boost clock, which is up from the reference specifications of 1050MHz, and 1178MHz respectively. It also features 4GB of GDDR5 memory, a 256-bit memory interface, and an effective memory clock of 7010 MHz.
The GTX 970 is based on the NVIDIA GM204 GPU core which features NVIDIA’s latest Maxwell core architecture. For more information on Maxwell, and its specific features you can check out our launch review of the ASUS GTX 970 STRIX.
Inside the packaging you will find the graphics situated in its foam resting place, 2 MOLEX to 6-Pin PCIe power adapters and a DVI to VGA adapter.
The Zotac GeForce GTX 970 AMP! Omega Core Edition graphics card can currently be purchased for $420.35, which is quite a bit higher than Zotac’s MSRP of $339. This happens and is most likely due to inventory, so we would not be surprised if the price settled down soon after this article is published. The card also comes with ZOTAC’s standard two-year warranty for manufactures defects, that can further be upgraded to three years.