EVGA GeForce GTX 1080 FTW GAMING ACX 3.0 vs ZOTAC GTX 1080 AMP! Extreme

At $649, it's on the cheaper side as far as 1080 graphics cards go. While not really excelling at anything, it has no serious drawbacks either. Making it a good card for people who want a compromise between price and performance.

With a length of 267mm and height of 128mm, the GTX 1080 FTW is one of the most compact 1080 cards available.

The FTW ACX 3.0 leaves a lot of room for tweaking. You can overclock for up to +147MHz Core and +176MHz Memory before starting to lose on either core or memory speed.

Both the GPU and memory clocks are slightly overclocked out of the box. This provides excellent performance without having to do much tweaking.

The AMP! Extreme is probably one of the quietest cards in this category. Idle noise level is a bit hard to calculate in this case since for temperatures under 60 degrees C the fans are off, but under very light load which pushes the card to about 60 degrees C it reached a noise level of about 33dBA, comparable to the idle noise level of most 1080 cards. Under heavy load however, it registered a noise level of 38dBA, the lowest in this comparison.

Performance-wise, the ZOTAC GTX 1080 AMP! Extreme achieved a 3DMark Score (Firestrike) of 19410 with minimal FPS never dropping below 86 with averages of 157.25 for FHD and 109.5 for WQHD.

At a price of $639.99, which is an average price for 1080 graphics cards and numbers that usually top benchmark charts, the ZOTAC GTX 1080 AMP! Extreme offers great value for what you will be paying.

The 1080 AMP Extreme is equiped with three 90mm dual-bladed EKO fans, which according to Zotac increase the airflow by 30% and increase the air pressure by 15%. Furthermore, the fans are equipped on top of a heatsink with six variably configured heatpipes which greatly increases the heat extraction off the card. Or at least, that's what Zotac claims.

When idle, it does not surpass the threshold of 33 degrees C and even under heavy load it reached peak temperatures of 73 degrees C, well below the 80 degrees C set by the GTX 1080 Founders Edition.

Only takes 5 mins to install.

Zotac offers a five years long warranty for this card. That's quite long for most electronics equipment, not only graphics cards.