Introduction

Zotac GeForce RTX 3070 Ti AMP Holo is the company’s premium custom-design offering based on NVIDIA’s latest addition to its RTX 30-series “Ampere” product family. The GeForce RTX 3070 Ti, along with last week’s RTX 3080 Ti, are additions to the higher-end of NVIDIA’s product stack, in response to competition from AMD’s Radeon RX 6000 series “Big Navi” graphics cards. The RTX 3070 Ti, in particular, is being launched to close a price-performance gap between the RTX 3070 and RTX 3080, as the RTX 3070 is embattled on two fronts, from the RX 6700 XT, and the RX 6800.

NVIDIA could have been lazy and simply cut down its latest GA102 silicon, but was prudent. Rather, the company decided to not only max out the GA104 silicon, unlocking all its 6,144 CUDA cores; but also give the chip 35% faster 19 Gbps GDDR6X memory, as opposed to 14 Gbps GDDR6 on the original RTX 3070. These, combined with slightly higher clock speeds and power limits, could be NVIDIA’s answer to competitors from AMD.

The GeForce “Ampere” architecture represents the 2nd generation of NVIDIA’s RTX real-time raytracing technology, and introduces 2nd generation RT cores that double ray intersection performance and feature fixed-function hardware for even more raytraced effects; 3rd generation Tensor cores that leverage the sparsity phenomenon in AI deep-learning neural nets to increase inference performance by an order of magnitude; and the Ampere CUDA core itself, which significantly increases performance by leveraging concurrent INT32 and FP32 math operations.

The Zotac RTX 3070 Ti AMP Holo features the company’s highest state of tune for this GPU. The chip runs at a boost frequency of 1830 MHz boost, compared to 1770 MHz reference. The HoloBlack cooling solution combines the cooling prowess of a large triple-fan aluminium fin-stack heatsink; with the aesthetics of a large ARGB LED diffuser the company calls the Spectra lighting system. In this review, we show you if it’s worth forking out a little extra for this card over the Founders Edition.