zotac-geforce-rtx-3070-ti-amp-holo-review

Zotac GeForce RTX 3070 Ti AMP Holo Review

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.

GeForce RTX 3070 Ti Market Segment Analysis
  Price Cores ROPs Core

Clock
Boost

Clock
Memory

Clock
GPU Transistors Memory
RX 5700 XT $370 2560 64 1605 MHz 1755 MHz 1750 MHz Navi 10 10300M 8 GB, GDDR6, 256-bit
RTX 2070 $340 2304 64 1410 MHz 1620 MHz 1750 MHz TU106 10800M 8 GB, GDDR6, 256-bit
RTX 3060 $900 3584 48 1320 MHz 1777 MHz 1875 MHz GA106 13250M 12 GB, GDDR6, 192-bit
RTX 2070 Super $450 2560 64 1605 MHz 1770 MHz 1750 MHz TU104 13600M 8 GB, GDDR6, 256-bit
Radeon VII $680 3840 64 1400 MHz 1800 MHz 1000 MHz Vega 20 13230M 16 GB, HBM2, 4096-bit
RTX 2080 $600 2944 64 1515 MHz 1710 MHz 1750 MHz TU104 13600M 8 GB, GDDR6, 256-bit
RTX 2080 Super $690 3072 64 1650 MHz 1815 MHz 1940 MHz TU104 13600M 8 GB, GDDR6, 256-bit
RTX 3060 Ti $1300 4864 80 1410 MHz 1665 MHz 1750 MHz GA104 17400M 8 GB, GDDR6, 256-bit
RX 6700 XT $1000

2560 64 2424 MHz 2581 MHz 2000 MHz Navi 22 17200M 12 GB, GDDR6, 192-bit
RTX 2080 Ti $1400 4352 88 1350 MHz 1545 MHz 1750 MHz TU102 18600M 11 GB, GDDR6, 352-bit
RTX 3070 $1300 5888 96 1500 MHz 1725 MHz 1750 MHz GA104 17400M 8 GB, GDDR6, 256-bit
RTX 3070 Ti $1300

MSRP: $600
6144 96 1575 MHz 1770 MHz 1188 MHz GA104 17400M 8 GB, GDDR6X, 256-bit
Zotac RTX 3070 Ti

AMP Holo
$1350 6144 96 1575 MHz 1830 MHz 1188 MHz GA104 17400M 8 GB, GDDR6X, 256-bit
RX 6800 $1400 3840 96 1815 MHz 2105 MHz 2000 MHz Navi 21 26800M 16 GB, GDDR6, 256-bit
RX 6800 XT $1700 4608 128 2015 MHz 2250 MHz 2000 MHz Navi 21 26800M 16 GB, GDDR6, 256-bit
RTX 3080 $1500 8704 96 1440 MHz 1710 MHz 1188 MHz GA102 28000M 10 GB, GDDR6X, 320-bit
RTX 3080 Ti $2200 10240 112 1365 MHz 1665 MHz 1188 MHz GA102 28000M 12 GB, GDDR6X, 384-bit
core-i9-11900kb-rumored-to-power-intel’s-latest-beast-canyon-nuc

Core i9-11900KB Rumored To Power Intel’s Latest Beast Canyon NUC

Beast Canyon NUC
(Image credit: Koolshare)

Twitter user HXL has discovered the first photograph of Intel’s upcoming NUC 11 Extreme (codename Beast Canyon) system. More interestingly, although the pictures don’t show the processor, the leaker claims that the NUC features one of the chipmaker’s latest Tiger Lake B-series processors. Take this claim with a pinch of salt as it is unconfirmed, but it would make sense given Intel’s shifting target audience. 

Intel briefly teased Beast Canyon at its Computex 2021 keynote. Beast Canyon is the successor to the chipmaker’s Ghost Canyon NUC. However, Beast Canyon marks a fundamental turn for NUCs as it’ll be the first device to offer support for a full-length discrete graphics card, making it more akin to a small form factor (SFF) system than a traditional NUC.

The Beast Canyon NUC will even come equipped with its own power supply, but Intel didn’t mention the capacity. Unless it’s a really generous capacity, it’ll probably limit the type of graphics card you can install in the chassis. 

Like its predecessor, Beast Canyon will also leverage Intel’s “The Element” compute module. Everything from the processor and memory to display outputs will reside on the module itself, which then slots into a PCIe slot.

It’s reasonable to assume that Intel will offer Beast Canyon with different processor options. The one from the photograph is reportedly based on the Core i9-11900KB, which is the flagship chip from the Tiger Lake B-series lineup. 

The Core i9-11900KB is a 10nm desktop chip that features BGA packaging. The Tiger Lake processor delivers eight cores, 16 threads and 24MB of L3 cache. The Willow Cove cores run with a 3.3 GHz base clock and flaunt a 5.3 GHz TVB (Thermal Velocity Boost) clock. Intel rates the Core i9-11900KB as a 65W part but allows OEMs to drop the TDP all the way down to 55W.

At Computex 2021, Intel confirmed that Beast Canyon would launch later this year. From the rumors that we’ve heard, we could be looking at a potential fourth-quarter release.