Review: Zotac Geforce GTX 280 AMP Edition graphics card

Nvidia’s GT200 is its second-generation DirectX10 graphics core following on from the highly successful G80.

At present, there are just two flavours: the GTX 260 and the flagship GTX280, which is what this Zotac card is based on.

Rather than a totally new design, the new core has improved and added to the G80’s architecture, doubling the processing power in the process. It also houses a colossal 1.4 billion transistors.

As standard, the GTX 280 has 240 stream processors clocked at 1,296MHz, a core running at 602GHz and 1GB of GDDR3 memory clocked at 1.1GHz (2.21GHz effective) running via a 512-bit memory interface, which gives a hefty bandwidth of 141.7Gbits/sec.

However, the AMP Edition moniker indicates this model is from Zotac’s overclocked range. All three clocks have been tinkered, so the core runs at 700MHz, the shader at 1,400MHz and the memory at 2.3GHz.

A dual-slot cooler dissipates heat and covers the entire PCB of the card. Nvidia quotes the maximum rated power at 236W; it features a single 6-pin power connector alongside an 8-pin version. The board also supports Nvidia’s Hybrid Power technology, allowing compatible motherboards to switch to integrated graphics to save power during non-graphically intensive applications.

As for performance, Zotac’s version of the GTX280 is the fastest single core graphics card we’ve tested. At 1,280x1,024, it produced a 3Dmark06 score of 13,264, while Crysis returned a frame rate of 53fps at 1,280x1,024 with 4x anti-aliasing and 4x anisotropic filtering with all details set to high. Even at 1,600x1,200 with the same filtering, it managed an amazingly impressive 43fps.

If you’re after top-end performance and don’t mind paying the price, this is the card for you.

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