ZOTAC GeForce RTX 3090 Ti AMP Extreme Holo Review

The ZOTAC GeForce RTX 3090 Ti AMP Extreme Holo is by far the most powerful card we’ve tested so far. Powered by the upgraded GA102 chip, it is the pinnacle of the NVIDIA Ampere architecture, and can handle with ease almost anything you throw at it. Compared to the RTX 3090, the RTX 3090 Ti comes with 256 additional shading units, 2 extra RT cores, and 8 additional Tensor cores. The card also features higher GPU base and boost clocks, as well as higher memory clock, which is now rated at 21 Gbps. The new card also proves to be a true power hog, but we’ll talk more about that later. Right now, the main question is whether this card is worth buying, and why? Here is our review.

ZOTAC GeForce RTX 3090 Ti AMP Extreme Holo Specifications

On the outside, the ZOTAC GeForce RTX 3090 Ti AMP Extreme Holo is a stunning graphics card. Compared to ZOTAC’s other premium RTX 30 series models, this card comes with a new heatsink design, which now includes slightly different shroud cutouts for fans, as well as new RGB element on its side. This all is part of the new HoloBlack design, which ZOTAC claims to have won several awards so far.

The card also comes with the most powerful IceStorm 2.0 cooling system to date, which ZOTAC purposely modified to cool down the mighty GA102 chip. The new cooling system now incorporates a direct pass-thru airflow vent which helps improve heat dissipation and reduce airflow turbulence, as well as decrease overall noise. The heatsink also includes three 11-blade fans which increase static pressure and airflow by up to 10% compared to ZOTAC’s cards with older IceStorm heatsinks.

Measuring almost 356 mm in length, and 64 mm in height, the ZOTAC GeForce RTX 3090 Ti AMP Extreme Holo is a pretty chunky graphics card. It features a 3.5-slot design, meaning it will occupy much of the space in your computer case. According to ZOTAC, the reason why the card is so thick is because it features a wider and thicker aluminum fin-stack array to improve the card’s cooling performance. Under its plastic heatsink shroud, the RTX 3090 Ti AMP Exteme Holo hides eight copper heat pipes which span beyond the length of the card’s PCB in order to draw away as much heat as possible from the central GPU chip.

Another reason why the card has such a huge heatsink is the fact that it comes with a 18+3 power phases VRM design, which is here to ensure maximum performance and stability, even when the card is overclocked. The fact that the card has some many power phases indicates that not a single power phase will be overworked even in the most stressful situations. However, having so many of them unavoidably increases heat output by a large margin, which is why this card has such a large heatsink.

Speaking of power, this card is a true power hog. The recommend power supply for this card is rated to 850 W, and the RTX 3090 Ti’s official TDP is 450 W. To put in perspective how much power this is, keep in mind that a single RTX 3090 Ti consumes the same amount of power under full load as seven HP ProDesk office PCs featuring Intel Core i5-9600T CPU. In short, the RTX 3090 Ti is a stupendously power-hungry graphics card, which isn’t only very expensive, but it also comes with high electricity bills. The card also comes with non-standard 12+4-pin PCI-E 5.0 power connector, however, ZOTAC supplied a 3 x 8-pin power adapter, meaning you won’t have to buy the latest PSU compliant with the PCI-E 5.0 specification to run this card.

From other features, it’s worth mentioning that the card comes bundled with a GPU support bracket which helps ameliorate sagging, and it also features an NVLink connector, meaning it can run in a dual-GPU SLI setup with another supported NVIDIA RTX card. The card also features three DisplayPort 1.4a connectors, and one HDMI 2.1 connector.

Gaming Benchmarks

Just like the Founders Edition model, the ZOTAC GeForce RTX 3090 Ti AMP Exteme Holo features a base GPU clock of 1,560 MHz, and a boost clock of 1,860 MHz. Along with that, the card can boast with effective memory clock of 21 Gbps, which paired with 24GB of GDDR6X VRAM and a 384-bit bus, is able to result in a maximum theoretical memory bandwidth of whooping 1,008 GB/s.

However, being great on paper doesn’t necessarily mean being great in practice. For that reason, we’ve decided to put the card on our bench and test its performance. The testing rig we’ve used for purposes of this review was based on the AMD Ryzen 9 5900X CPU, and included 16GB of DDR4-3600 RAM, as well as two 1GB NVMe SSD drives. Down below you can see our benchmark results.

As you can see, at 1080p resolution the ZOTAC GeForce RTX 3090 Ti AMP Extreme Holo is a complete overkill. There is really no point buying this card for gaming in Full HD, since there are much cheaper alternatives which can deliver great results. Even with ray tracing enabled, the GeForce RTX 3070 Ti is more than enough capable of delivering rock-solid 60 frames per second on ultra settings at 1080p. Of course, the RTX 3090 Ti is an absolute king here, but keep in mind that the card is bottlenecked by the CPU at this resolution, even if paired with a high-end CPU, like our AMD Ryzen 9 5900X.

Even at 1440p, the GeForce RTX 3090 Ti is capable of delivering overkill performance. In all the games we’ve tested, the card was able to render more than 100 fps on average with all settings set to ultra, which is simply stellar performance. In Cyberpunk 2077, the card was able to score 102 fps on average, which was full 12 fps (12.5%) more than the average framerate of mighty GeForce RTX 3080 Ti.

Only at 4K we could see the true power of the ZOTAC GeForce RTX 3090 Ti. Here the card completely obliterated all of its competition, although its performance gap to GeForce RTX 3080 Ti reduced significantly. At 4K our GeForce RTX 3050 couldn’t deliver more than 20 fps in most games, so we’ve excluded these results. The same applies to the GeForce RTX 3060 in case of Cyberpunk 2077.

The only game in which the GeForce RTX 3090 Ti couldn’t deliver more than 60 fps was Cyberpunk 2077. In all the other games the average framerate result was around 70 fps mark. Clearly, the RTX 3090 Ti is in a league of its own, far away from the likes of the RTX 3070 Ti, let alone “mid-range” cards, such as the GeForce RTX 3060, or GeForce RTX 2070 SUPER. However, at 4K the new RTX 3090 Ti was, on average, only about 10.6% faster than the GeForce RTX 3080 Ti, which is still a great result, however, hardly justifies its +$800 price tag increase over the NVIDIA’s current flagship gaming graphics card.

Of course, the RTX 3090 Ti isn’t just designed to be used as a gaming graphics card. Just like the RTX 3090, it supports SLI setups, and is an ideal choice for workstation professionals, 3D modelers, and software engineers who heavily rely on the power of AI. Nevertheless, paying $2,000 for a graphics card is an awful lot of money, meaning only the ones with deeper pockets will be able to buy it.

Temperature, Noise & Power

The ZOTAC GeForce RTX 3090 Ti comes with two BIOS modes. One is called Silent mode, and the other one is called Amplify mode. In Silent mode the card’s fans run at lower speeds, which results in lower noise output, but causes GPU to slightly overheat. In Silent mode, the card ran at around 79°C under full load, which was, by our standards, barely acceptable. The overall noise levels were around 43 dBA mark, which wasn’t quite “silent”, but compared to the 50 dBA in Amplify mode, it was much more acceptable.

In Amplify mode, the card was very audible. At times, it was irritatingly loud, but the average temperature under full load was at acceptable 69°C. In both modes, the card consumes the same amount of power, so there is really no difference between modes in that regard. Down below you can see a table showing all of our recorded results.

Overclocking

For purposes of this review, we’ve also slightly overclocked the card to see how it performs with increased GPU and memory clocks. Using the MSI Afterburner, we increased the clock speed by 130 MHz, and memory clock by 162 MHz. At higher clocks the card became unstable, and we started noticing artifacts in games, so we didn’t try to push the card any further.

As you can see, overclocking the card increased the card’s rendering speed by up to 3.9% on average across all three resolutions. This was very welcome performance boost to the already amazing performance, meaning that the GeForce RTX 3090 Ti is a fairly decent overclocker, and will benefit from increased core and memory clocks. The only downside is that the card became even louder, with fans generating 51 dBA of noise, and the total system power draw being increased by the additional 20 W.

Conclusion

What can we say? The data speaks for itself. Without a doubt, the GeForce RTX 3090 Ti is currently the fastest and the most powerful graphics card on the planet. It can boast with an amazing 4K shading performance, that is only matched with the likes of GeForce RTX 3080 Ti or Radeon RX 6900 XT.

However, the RTX 3090 Ti has a lot of downsides. Firstly, it is incredibly expensive, and we see no way of how would NVIDIA justify its extremely high MSRP. Secondly, its power consumption is stupendously high. It consumes around 100 W more than the RTX 3080 Ti, yet it is able to deliver “only” 10% better performance. Like we already said, the RTX 3090 Ti is in a league of its own in terms of shading performance, but when it comes to power consumption it is very inefficient card. And thirdly, the RTX 3090 Ti is a very hot, chunky and loud card. Under full load, the card runs at around 70°C, and produces 50 dBA of noise, which is really unimpressive.

The ZOTAC’s model we’ve tested can boast with great build quality and stunning aesthetics. In our opinion, the only flaw of this amazing graphics card is that it doesn’t have a physical switch for its dual BIOS feature. Other than that, it is a great product, except for the flaws related to all cards featuring NVIDIA’s latest GA102 chip.

If you have money to spare, or you are a serious workstation professional, then we recommend buying this card. Otherwise, you should just wait for the RTX 40 series GPUs, which are promising to deliver RTX 3090 Ti’s performance for much more affordable price.

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