Gadgetory

this is a product I've been wanting to take a look at for a while this is the ZOTAC GeForce GTX 480 and edition so it's a GTX 480 but it includes an aftermarket cooler and ZOTAC was actually one of if not the first to market with an aftermarket cooled GTX 480 something that it really benefits from because it'll run quite a bit cooler quite a bit quieter so we'll go around have a look at the back it's the same usual marketing stuff on the back of the box you know what this one's going to be all about having a look at the part itself so let's get this baby opened up and see what ZOTAC includes with the GTX 480 amp Edition first of all this is quite an attractive looking card it has a dual turbine vga cooler which basically looks like 292 millimeter fans you can see part of the fan is actually covered by the shroud a little bit there it's got kind of a neat graphic on the front of it the one thing you'll notice right away about this cooler is that it is triple slot so you see the backplate is dual slot you've got one more slot worth of cooler here and that's something that you will have to sacrifice in order to use the amp Edition card other than that it is a stock reference GTX 480 so you can see right here they haven't changed the PCB to account for the different cooler stereo I'll show you a stock stock cooled ZOTAC GTX 480 over here so you can see the back of the card will look identical okay but it's all about the changes that they've made to the cooler so I wouldn't expect any better overclocking results on the amp Edition because of it being cherry-picked or anything like that but I would definitely expect better overclocking results due to the additional GPU cooling so you can see that we've got I'm actually just gonna cheat a little bit and count them here one two three four five he pipes coming off of the GPU contact area so one of them comes up this way the next one goes up that way and runs all the way to the end so three of the heat pipes run down to the end over here and then two of them run down to these ends one here one here one disadvantage of the amp series cooler is that it does not exhaust the heat out of the case like the stock cooler does so you can see here all of that heat is being exhausted by the fan out the back of the case but that is not the case with the amp so you will have to make sure you have a well ventilated case but I mean if you're buying a almost $600 graphics card you should probably get a decent case to go along with it one thing I really like about the amp is you can see they've got a custom feed up custom heat sink under the amp cooler for the GPU so that's going to take care of all of your room all of your VRMs all of that good stuff and compared to the aftermarket solution that I'll be comparing the amp to it's quite a bit more elegant so I just wanted to show it very briefly next to the gelid solutions i see visions so i'm just gonna move the blocks away ah in terms of accessories you got a couple of molex to PCIe a dual piece guy you get six pin to eight pin you got a mini HDMI to HDMI DVI to VGA you got some documentation and let's get back to the card because that is what it's all about for this particular video so here's the IC vision here's the amp and here is a stock coolant card okay so all of them look pretty similar both the amp and the IC vision I'm gonna look at them from the side but both of these are going to be three slot coolers so you're not going to be able to make use of the slot next to the card nor the next one but a lot of SLI compatible motherboards that's not going to be a problem as long as you don't intend to install any other cards besides your graphics cards they both include 92 millimeter fans dual ones the IC vision you can see has a similar number of heat pipes it's got five heat pipes but they are arranged a little bit differently and it also has not as elegant a solution for cooling all the other parts of the card so you can see you got to kind of stack up a bunch of different heat sinks on the VRMs you got these little whiskey memory heat sinks down here now it's probably going to be perfectly adequate I wouldn't worry about the card being damaged anyway but I do like this solution better where you've got one nice big unis Inc style thing and it's cooling all the different parts of the card you could snice and beefy there so just like the normal GTX 480 it uses one eight pin in one six pin connector and other than that I guess there's not really a whole lot to say thank you for checking out my unboxing of the zotac amp Edition GTX 480 and hopefully I'll have a temperature comparison up for you in the next little bit here actually one thing I forgot to include about the amp Edition card is a quick cost comparison so you can see that the regular ZOTAC GTX 480 is 519 after rebate so that's actually five $49.99 before rebate and then the amp Edition card is actually only another $30 before rebate and then only another $60 after rebate whereas if you grab an IC oh shoot I lost my search result whereas if you buy a regular 480 with an IC vision you're actually looking at about the same price except that you have to do the work of installing the aftermarket cooler so if you are buying a GTX 480 and you do intend to install a big three slot aftermarket cooler on it I see no reason not to go with an amp Edition because it does come with a lifetime warranty and it saves you the trouble of installing that cooler on it it also means that the warranty will cover you for the aftermarket cooling