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0 Are you looking for that epic upgrade to your PC? Well, ZOTAC has you covered, with the recently released ZOTAC RTX 4080 Amp Extreme AIRO. Yes, I know that it’s a long name, but with the long name, comes a long list of great features.
Ice Cold Performance
Having been a ZOTAC GPU owner before, I thought it prudent to take hold of this review sample. I jammed it into my case, and set aside some time to see how this performed.
Design
Whenever I look at a ZOTAC GPU I’m always impressed with how sleek they are. The ZOTAC RTX 4080 Amp Extreme AIRO is no different. With its triple fan layout, the card looks ready to dissipate heat as quickly as possible.
The card itself is a chunky boy, with it needing 3.5 empty slots on your motherboard. Meaning it won’t fit into everyone’s case. Add to that the length of 355.5mm, it will definitely need some sizeable real estate. Thankfully being the team member with one of the biggest cases I naturally had ample space left once installing the GPU. Included in the box to help with the size of the graphics card is a support stand. Luckily I have a reinforced GPU slot on my motherboard, but even then I still used the stand just in case.
Let’s Talk Power
As with most questions when it comes to GPUs, it’s all about the power. Do you need a new PSU to even contemplate upgrading? Well, the specs suggest a recommended power supply of 750w. Now I don’t know what I was thinking when I built my PC, but I must have been able to read into the future. There in my case, was a beautiful 750w power supply. The GPU itself has a power consumption of 320w.
One thing to be mindful of if you are going to upgrade to the ZOTAC RTX 4080 Amp Extreme AIRO is that you will need three 8 pin power ports (or whatever the technical term is) on your power supply. Included in the box is a 12VHPWR cable. If you are a big cable management nut (I am not) then this might cause you a headache as the cable itself is pretty rigid, probably for carrying all those watts around.
RGB
Now what kind of PCMR person would I be if I didn’t talk about the RGB available on this card? Sporting the latest SPECTRA 2.0 RGB lighting, allowing you to control different zones as well as a number of other elements. I will be totally honest with you, RGB for me is completely useless. My PC is in such a position that it would be more of a distraction, however, there are options there for those who do enjoy making their computer all colour-coordinated.
Compatibility
Being a GPU in the current age can be difficult, there are so many different combinations of monitors out there. There are also multi-monitor setups. The ZOTAC RTX 4080 Amp Extreme AIRO has you covered though. With 3 DisplayPort adapters (1.4) and 1 HDMI port, you can connect up to 4 monitors at one time. The DisplayPort supports a resolution of up to 7680 x 4320 at 60hz, and the HDMI supports 4K 120hz with HDR or even 8K at 60hz with HDR.
Performance Benchmarks
With my current PC sporting a very tasty 3080 card I was hoping to see some big upgrades to the benchmarks carried out. However, due to the CPU in my computer still being a Ryzen 7 2700x (Yes I know, 2024 is the year of the upgrade) I was sure I would see some bottlenecks, so please bear that in mind with the following results.
Using Superposition, and Unigine Heaven benchmark tools. I ran the same couple of processes across both graphics cards with the results shown below.
Superposition Benchmark
My different brand 3080 card, running the 1080p Extreme benchmark, hit a lovely 10773 score, with a max FPS of 110.48. However, the ZOTAC card absolutely destroyed it with an approximately 50% increase. The benchmark score was 15775 with a max FPS of 156.48. This one really surprised me
Turning up the benchmark to the 4K Optimised option, and once again my 3080 card achieved a respectable 14333 score, with a max FPS of 135.83. With the ZOTAC 4080 reaching 19759 and a max FPS of 204.95. A whopping increase there, enough to justify the price tag alone?
Unigine Heaven Benchmark
With so many options to choose from with the Heaven program, I went to a 2560 x 1440 resolution, with quality on Ultra and tessellation on Extreme. I hit run and let it do its thing!
My current GPU reached a respectable 183.6 FPS and a score of 4626, whereas the ZOTAC 4080 reached 233.0 FPS and a score of 5868.
So with both of these benchmarks, the ZOTAC RTX 4080 Amp Extreme AIRO had decent improvements over a 30 series GPU of the same number.
Final Thoughts
So how do I feel about the ZOTAC RTX 4080 Amp Extreme AIRO? Well, I didn’t want to swap back, but had to.
With great looks and great performance, once again ZOTAC has hit all the right notes and as such the ZOTAC RTX 4080 Amp Extreme AIRO can easily receive the Thumb Culture Gold Award.
Disclaimer: A sample was received in order to write this review.
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