The scaly green dragon spewing fire from its maw, as depicted on the both the box of and the decal affixed to Zotac's GeForce GTX 580 AMP! Edition video card, is an apt symbol for this particular piece of hardware. Like the original GTX 580 reference version, this one is a killer: the most powerful single-GPU video card you can buy, featuring all of Nvidia's latest innovations and technologies and giving you an outstanding gaming experience. The AMP! is also overclocked, to give you even more performance. But, as it springs from Nvidia's standard, you'll have to deal with the twin demons of high price ($529.99 list) and high power usage to get all those benefits, so make sure you're prepared before you drop a cool half-grand on this hot card.
Except for that dragon sticker, the GeForce GTX 580 AMP! Edition looks like an identical twin to Nvidia's reference model. It's 10.5 inches in length; long enough that it won't fit in every case out there, but not irresponsibly so. It has a beveled interior edge to aid in air circulation, especially in multicard Scalable Link Interface (SLI) setups. (You can connect up to three cards together.) And it's got three output ports on the back panel: two dual-link DVI and one mini HDMI. Because of the size of its fan and heat sink unit, this PCI Express (PCIe) x16 card will block an additional expansion slot.
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Inside, the hardware hasn't changed much, either. The GPU is still the GF110, the fully stocked version of the top Fermi architecture's latest iteration. This means it's loaded with 16 Streaming Multiprocessors, and thus a towering total of 512 CUDA cores, 16 polymorph engines, four raster units, 64 texture units, and 48 ROPs. (The amount of memory, 1,536MB of GDDR5 working across a 384-bit memory interface, remains unchanged.) Video hardware this substantial requires a fair amount of power: Nvidia recommends a power supply of at least 600 watts (that's if you're just using one card, mind you), and you'll need two direct connections from that power supply: one six-pin and one eight-pin. Like all of the other cards that use Nvidia's silicon, the card supports the full range of CUDA parallel processing, PhysX physics processing, and 3D Vision stereoscopic 3D technologies.
Where the Zotac card differs from the baseline are in its clock rates, all of which have been bumped up slightly. The standard graphics clock of 772 MHz has been raised to 815 MHz, the memory clock from 4,008 MHz to 4,100 MHz, and the processor clock from 1,544 MHz to 1,630 MHz.
As you might expect, this does make a difference in performance—if not a huge one. Across the board in our performance tests, we saw measurable, if minute, increases from the regular GTX 580's scores at the top resolutions (1,920 by 1,200 and 2,560 by 1,600) with all details maxed out. 3DMark 11, on the Extreme (1,920-by-1,200) preset, rose from 1,961 to 2,045. Aliens vs. Predator inched to 45.6 frames per second (fps) from 43.8 at the lower resolution, and from 27.7 to 28.8 on the higher. Ditto Far Cry 2 (103.85 to 107.48; 71.7 to 74.7), Heaven Benchmark 2.1 (31.5 to 32.9; 22.1 to 22.9, one of the lowest increases we saw), Just Cause 2 (36.7 to 38; 24.22 to 25.55), Lost Planet 2 (51.3 to 53.7; 36.8 to 38.8), Metro 2033 (32.33 to 33.67; 20.33 to 21.33), and S.T.A.L.K.E.R: Call of Pripyat (59.8 to 62.6; 37.9 to 39.7). (Technically, we saw the same thing on H.A.W.X. 2 as well, but the increases at these speeds—142 to 148 and 94 to 99—are effectively meaningless. The card can handle the game, trust us!)
There was a slight difference in power usage, too. We measured slightly lower values during idle (about 143 watts for the Zotac card, about 145 for the reference model), and slightly higher values under load in our Metro 2033 test using an Extech Datalogger (the Zotac pulling in about 360 watts, the reference model just under 359). Again, individual watts don't matter too much here—either way, the GTX 580 is going to gobble up power when you push it to its limits, so make sure you (and maybe your electricity provider) are prepared.
All these cases raise the question: Is the Zotac GeForce GTX 580 AMP! Edition worth the slight premium over a stock-clocked model? It's a close call, especially given how modest Zotac's factory overclocking is—unless you're running a huge monitor and want to squeeze out every spare frame you can, most ordinary hard-core players won't see a substantial difference. A better argument is the inclusion of Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands, which will give you a fun way to flex your card's muscles right out of the box. But if, aside from the game, the Zotac card isn't dynamically better than another GTX 580 running at regular speeds, getting it will still net you by far the most capable single-GPU card on the market.
