Zotac’s new GTX 1080 Ti graphics cards use cool tricks for max performance

Zotac has revealed a trio of new GTX 1080 Ti graphics cards which include some neat cooling tricks and customizable lighting.

The top-end card is the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti AMP Extreme (pictured above), followed by the GTX 1080 Ti AMP edition (pictured below), and lastly the base model is the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti Blower (pictured bottom).

We’ll deal with the former two first, although at this stage, we don’t know the exact spec details of these more powerful boards, such as the clock speeds.

However, in this initial reveal, Zotac highlighted some of the neat features present on both models, which include Spectra LED lighting that can be fully customized, along with 16 + 2 power phases to ensure efficient power distribution and better stability.

There’s also an IceStorm cooling system for taming any potential heat issues with these beefy cards, with the AMP edition getting a pair of 100mm wide-blade fans, and the Extreme version benefiting from a trio of 90mm fans.

The latter card also gets metallic ‘ExoArmor’ featuring a metal backplate and copper which is directly in contact with the GPU core for the best cooling performance (along with strategically placed thermal pads on other heat-generating components).

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Freezing fans

Zotac also says it has ‘Freeze fan stop’ tech on board both of these cards for measuring temperatures and accurately determining how fast those fans should spin.

Firestorm, Zotac’s companion software utility, allows you to change the color, brightness and so forth of the LEDs with just a click or two, and easily adjust elements such as fan settings.

On the connectivity front, both cards are identical in terms of having an HDMI 2.0b port, along with three DisplayPorts (1.4) and a DL-DVI connector.

One other difference between these two offerings is that the more powerful Extreme edition takes up 2.5 expansion slots in your PC, as opposed to 2 slots for the plain AMP card.

As for the base model, Zotac’s GTX 1080 Ti Blower, this is a more straightforward graphics card which doesn’t have the IceStorm cooling, LED lights or indeed any of the aforementioned neat features.

It’s ‘just’ a plain 1080 Ti that has standard cooling and the same connectivity as the other boards (minus the DVI port), although in this case we do know the clock speeds: a base clock of 1480MHz and boost to 1582MHz. As we mentioned before, the clock speeds of the two more powerful AMP models have yet to be revealed.

No pricing details have been made available for any of the three cards as yet, but hopefully we’ll hear more about that soon enough.

Darren is a freelancer writing news and features for TechRadar (and occasionally T3) across a broad range of computing topics including CPUs, GPUs, various other hardware, VPNs, antivirus and more. He has written about tech for the best part of three decades, and writes books in his spare time (his debut novel - 'I Know What You Did Last Supper' - was published by Hachette UK in 2013).