RTX 2070 Review

When it comes to enthusiast grades Graphics solution, ZOTAC needs no introduction as they have been in business for some while now and have been producing a high end to budget segment graphics cards based on the Nvidia’s GPUs (Nvidia AIB Partner). Their other line of products includes storage drives, mini PCs.

ZOTAC has a local presence in Pakistan through M/s PakDukaan who are their authorized distributor in this region. They have sent us for ZOTAC GeForce RTX 2070 Review. This is a second RTX 2070 on our test bench. We got to bench the Asus Strix RTX 2070 OC right when it was launched.

The ZOTAC GeForce RTX 2070 packs 2304 CUDA Cores with a base clock of 1410MHz and boost clock of 1860MHz. It features 8GB VRAM GDDR6 from Micron rated at 14.4 Gbps having a bus width of 256-bit using 460.8 GB/s bandwidth. The graphics card has 3x Display Ports and 1x HDMI port. The card has USB Type-C port for VR Headsets.

It features ZOTAC’s Icestorm 2.0 cooling solution using 3x 90mm fans which can be controlled independently and aluminum-based heatsink wide array with 5x nickel-plated copper heat pipes each of 8mm thickness. The graphics card has an aggressive, bold and beautifully designed shroud which sits that well with the wrap-around metallic backplate. The RGB lighting is there but its minimalistic to my liking.

Zotac Geforce RTX 2070 Review 2023

• Item:     GeForce RTX 2070 Review
• Manufacturer:  ZOTAC
• Price:     Check Price on Amazon

RTX 2070 Specifications:

Zotac Geforce rtx 2070 Packaging and Unboxing:

The graphics card is shipped inside a cardboard box which is placed inside an exterior paperboard box.

The front side of the main packing box has ZOTAC GAMING tag printed on the top left side. AMP Extreme is printed on the top right side. Salient feature highlights are printed on the bottom left side like 8GB GDDR6 Memory, Spectra Lighting, Fire Storm, Fire Storm application. 2070 is printed on the bottom right side.

The backside of the box is filled with information for the users. GeForce RTX 2070 is printed on the top left side. ZOTAC GAMING is printed on the top right side. There is a picture of the graphics card showing its shroud side followed by the feature highlights of the card like VR Ready, FireStorm, Spectra, etc. The features, system requirements, and specifications are printed below the picture. Minimum 550W PSU is required for this graphics card.

The left and right sides are identical. They have ZOTAC brand logo printed on the top. AMP Extrem is printed in the middle and GeForce RTX 2070 is printed at the bottom section.

The bottom side of the box has a yellow color background. ZOTAC GAMING is printed on the left side. Box’s contents are printed in 16 different languages. There is a sticker pasted on the right side showing the model, SKU, Part No of the graphics card in addition to the EAN and UPC bar codes.

GeForce RTX 2070 is printed on the left side whereas the ZOTAC GAMING is printed on the right side.

Taking out the inner box will surprise you. There is an animation on the graphics card’s picture which gives an impression of the fans rotating. To make this happen, there is a transparent wrap cover with lining printed on the sides. These lines, when aligned with the picture of the graphics card, will animate the picture. Super cool!

The inside cardboard box has a picture of the graphics card printed in the white color on the top.

 

Opening the inside box will show a container case tucked inside. This is a wrap cover. Lift it off to see the contents of the box.

Zotac rtx 2070 Components in Box:

Following is provided inside the box:

• 1x Graphics Card
• 1x Quick Installation Guide
• 1x Driver Pamphlet
• 1x ZOTAC Products Brochure
• 1x Case Badge
• 2x 2 6-pin to 8-pin adapter cables

2070 Closer Look:

It is time to take a closer look at the ZOTAC GeForce RTX 2070 Review. This is a factory overclocked card using a custom PCB. It is based on TU106 GPU from Nvidia using 12nm technology with a die size of 445mm² and packs 10800M transistors. It has 64 ROP and 144 TMU units with 2304 CUDA Cores or shader units. The pixel fill rate is 119.0 GPixel/s and texture fill rate is 267.8 GTexture/s.

This card has 8 GB from Micron using GDDR6 with bus width of 256-bit and cap at 460.8 GB/s bandwidth. The base clock on this card is 1410MHz with a boost clock of 1860MHz. The Zotac RTX 2070 Amp Extreme has a dimension of 308x113x57mm. It is effectively a 2.5 slot design as the shroud part extends over to the third slot. The graphics card features DirectX 12 API with 12_1 feature level and OpenGL standard of 4.5. No surprise there if it has no SLI support!

The really cool thing about the ZOTAC GeForce RTX 2070 Review is its design. The wrap around an idea is what I have been looking for in the cards and ZOTAC was thankfully ahead of the thinking in using the combination of plastic and metal without losing the overall aesthetics yet reducing the weight of the card given the toll it can take on the motherboard’s PCIe slots.

The shroud is mimicking the ZOTAC’s brand logo in an aggressive and bold manner. The outcome is one heck of a beautifully designed shroud finished in black color. The top and the bottom sides of the shroud itself are identical except for the left and right sides. The left side has textured lining finish whereas the right side has glossy finish. The same glossy finish can be seen on the inner sides of the patterns of the shroud around the fans. The center of all three fans is not identical.

Zotac RTX Cooling Solution:

The cooling solution on the ZOTAC GeForce RTX 2070 Amp Extreme is named as IceStorm 2.0 and it is nothing new design with potent cooling potential. Let’s take a look at the ingredients of this cooling solution.

The ZOTAC GeForce RTX 2070 Amp Extreme features 3x 90mm fans which are designed for optimal static pressure and best airflow. The really cool thing about the design is the individual control of the fan from the Fire Storm application that allows the user to focus on individual sections of the cards in terms of cooling as per the requirement.

The graphics card features a larger and thicker aluminum fin stack array in combination with five 8mm copper heat pipes, which four are straight; work in harmony to extract more heat than previous generation designs.

The main component of the cooling solution is the wide arrange aluminum heatsink. This full-body heatsink allows for the maximum heat dissipation. ZOTAC was definitely thoughtful of providing adequate cooling to the power delivery circuitry of the graphics card. They also have not forgotten about the adequate cooling of the VRAM chips as the main copper plate is making a contact with these chips with thermal pads in between.

The all-new graphics card is also stronger in durability. An additional die-cast metal jacket layer with full board coverage adds an integral structural strengthening and as a plus, additional heat dissipation for other components. Together with a redesigned wraparound backplate, it brings comprehensive support to the AMP EXTREME models for sheer protection.

Now that we have looked at the cooling solution, it is time to take a look at the top side of the ZOTAC GeForce RTX 2070 Amp Extreme edition. There is a glossy black middle portion with ZOTAC GAMING branding printed in the white color. There is LED underneath it. Spectra is the term, ZOTAC is using for the RGB lighting solution on this card. GEFORCE RTX is printed on the rightmost side of the shroud.

This side again is showing the all close approach to my liking. The metallic backplate is wraparound to cover half of this side with the rest of the side being covered by the shroud. There is still a gap in between for ventilation. The backplate portion here has vents for proper ventilation and not to deprive the card of the fresh air. Taking a closer look will also reveal that the shroud’s top portion has a gap between the fan’s cover and the shroud.

Taking a peek at the bottom side of the ZOTAC GeForce RTX 2070 Amp Extreme would show that the PCB is in black color. Thermal pads can be seen. PCIe connector with golden pins is also visible. There are two 4-pin headers on the far right side. One is in the white color whereas the other is in the black. There is another 4-pin header on the up front side of the PCB. Two are probably for the three fans as this graphics card has the provision to control the fans individually and the third one is for the RGB lighting LED.

Let’s take a look at the backside of the graphics card. One gets to see the stunning designed black color metallic backplate having ZOTAC brand logo in silver color below the power connector. LIVE TO GAME tag line is printed towards the other end of the backplate. The backside of the GPU is exposed. There is no thermal pad between the backside of the PCB and the backplate and a certain gap can be seen. This card has no SLI finger or NVLink as Nvidia did not provide this feature in RTX 2070 and below in the Turing architecture.

The ZOTAC GeForce RTX 2070 Amp Extreme edition has a single 8-pin and a 6-pin power connector. The card is rated for 225W power and minimum recommended PSU is 550W.

Following connectivity options are available on the ZOTAC GeForce RTX 2070 Amp Extreme edition:

• 3x Display Ports 1.4
• 1x HDMI 2.0b
• 1x USB Type-C

GeFroce 2070 Testing:

Following is the information regarding the test system and drivers that I have used to test this graphics card:

• Intel i7 8700k @ 5.0GHz
• Asus Strix Z390-E Gaming Motherboard
• Ballistix Elite 16GB kit @ 3000MHz
• Asus ROG Ryuo 360 CPU Cooler
• HyperX 120GB SSD
• Seagate Barracuda 3.5” 2 TB HDD
• Thermaltake TP RGB 750W Gold PSU

Drivers:

• Nvidia driver 417.71 for Gigabyte GeForce RTX 2060
• Nvidia driver 411.70 For Asus Strix RTX 2070 OC
• Nvidia driver 398.35 for GTX (Pascal) graphics cards
• Nvidia driver 417.71 for GTX 1080 [Required for Battlefield V]
• Nvidia driver 430.86 for GTX 1600 Series
• Nvidia driver 430.86 for Asus Strix RTX 2080 OC and Zotac RTX 2070 Amp Extreme
• AMD driver Adrenalin 2019 19.4.3 for the RX 570 and RX 580.

Monitoring Software:

MSI Afterburner 4.60 was used to monitor and record the FPS for the games without in-built benchmarks. Three runs per game per API per resolution were made and the average is being shown on the graphs. The tough ordeal for the tester!

Synthetic Benchmarks:

Following synthetic benchmarks have been used:

• 3DMark Fire Strike
• 3DMark Fire Strike Extreme
• 3DMark Fire Strike Ultra
• 3DMark Time Spy
• 3DMark Time Spy Extreme
• 3DMark Port Royal
• 3DMark Nvidia DLSS Feature Test
• Unigine Superposition

Zotac Gaming Geforce:

Following games have been benched:

• Ashes of the Singularity [DX11, DX12]
• Battlefield 1 [DX11, DX12]
• Battlefield V (DX11, DX12, DXR]
• Metro Last Light Redux [DX11]
• Metro Exodus [DX11, DX12, DXR]
• Assassin’s Creed Origin [DX11]
• Shadow of the Tomb Raider [DX12, DLSS]
• Grand Theft Auto – V [DX11]
• Final Fantasy – XV
• Far Cry 5 – [DX11]
• Middle Earth – Shadow of War [DX11]
• The Witcher 3 [DX11]
• DOOM [Vulkan]
• Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus [Vulkan]

Our testing includes Ray Tracing and DLSS as well. I will be covering the RT and DLSS in a separate section.

Synthetic Benchmarks:

In all three Fire Strike benchmarks the ZOTAC GeForce RTX 2070 Amp Extreme has taken a lead over the Asus Strix RTX 2070 OC. Please, keep in mind that both cards have been tested using different drivers and since the Asus card is not available, I was not able to retest it.

The graph of Unigine Superposition is sorted on the 1080p Extreme preset.

Gaming Benchmarks:

Battlefield 1 DX11

Battlefield 1 DX12

Battlefield V DX11

Battlefield V DX12

Metro Last Light Redux

Metro Exodus DX11

Metro Exodus DX12

Ashes of the Singularity DX11

Ashes of the Singularity DX12

Shadow of the Tomb Raider DX12

Assassin’s Creed Origin DX11

DOOM Vulkan

Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus Vulkan

Far Cry 5 DX11

Final Fantasy XV

Final Fantasy XV was benched using the game’s dedicated benchmark. The Final Fantasy XV benchmark outputs the result in terms of the score instead of the FPS. As this is a new title so I was only able to test it with the available graphics cards.

Grand Theft Auto – V DX11

Middle Earth: Shadow of War DX11

The Witcher 3 DX11

Ray Tracing and DLSS Benchmarks

Let’s start with the synthetic benchmarks.

The Zotac GeForce RTX 2070 Amp Extreme has secured 5605 overall score and sits between RTX 2060 and the RTX 2080.

3DMark has recently introduced the DLSS feature test to measure the performance gain if any using the DLSS based on Port Royal benchmark. The test repeats itself without DLSS and with DLSS. The user can select from three resolutions.

On 1080p, there is an improvement of 39.96% using the DLSS. The improvement on 1440p is 44.67%. At 4k the improvement is over 93.74%%. Clearly, DLSS is bringing improvement in the gaming performance as indicated by the synthetic benchmark. Let’s take a look at the gaming benchmarks.

Battlefield V DXR

I turned on the Ray Tracing and performance hit was quite apparent in terms of the FPS. RTX 2080 was locked out on 1080p when it comes to using DLSS with Ray Tracing. In Battlefield V, we can’t enable DLSS without enabling the Ray Tracing.

Turning the Ray Tracing on resulted in 38.10% performance hit on the 1080p. This was even more on the 1440p with 39.86%. 45.06% was the performance hit on the 2160p.

Next step was to enable the DLSS and test the game again using Ray Tracing with DLSS and to check how much percentage improvement was there. On 1080p, there was almost 7.78% improvement in the existing performance hit. 9.53% improvement was seen on 1440p.

42.10% improvement was seen on the 2160p. Though, we are seeing improvement by using DLSS with the DXR but overall, there is still quite a margin in the performance with and without Ray Tracing. Hopefully, the situation will improve with further driver optimization.

Metro Exodus DXR

Time to test the Ray Tracing and DLSS and this game seems to be giving less performance hit than the Battlefield V when it comes to gaming with Ray Tracing. I have tested the game with Ray Tracing set to Ultra with and without DLSS to have some numbers for the factual representation of what is going on with the Ray Tracing and at Ultra settings.

The graph is self-explanatory, to be honest as it is obvious that gaming with Ray Tracing has a performance hit. DLSS is definitely making up for the gap that is coming due to the performance hit.

Final Fantasy XV DLSS

Final Fantasy XV is one game that has DLSS settings at the user’s disposal to test in the game. Same is also available in the Benchmark utility. Following settings were used for the benching on DLSS. The game was benched on same custom settings with and without DLSS for the results.

With DLSS we are seeing approximately 29.33% performance improvement.

Shadow of the Tomb Raider DLSS

In terms of the overall performance, the ZOTAC GeForce RTX 2070 has outperformed the Asus Strix RTX 2070 OC though I would again highlight that the Asus card was tested on previous drivers and it could not be retested with the current drivers due to its non-availability. Surely, the Zotac RTX 2070 Amp Extreme can handle the gaming performance at 1080p and 1440p easily.

Geforce RTX 2070 Boost Clocks:

Now that we have taken a look at the gaming and synthetic benchmark results, it is time to take a look at the maximum boost clocks.

The ZOTAC GeForce RTX 2070 Amp Extreme Edition has boosted to whopping 2010MHz out of the box without any tweaking. The sustained clocks were on average 1965MHz which is quite impressive.

2070 Amp Sensors:

Following sensors are present on the Zotac GeForce RTX 2070 Amp Extreme

Overclocking, Power Consumption and Thermals:

For overclocking, the MSI Afterburner was used. Unfortunately, this graphics card seems to have struck with silicone bad luck as I was only able to push it further to +70MHz on the core clock and +450MHz on the memory clock at 100% voltage. This had resulted in mere improvement of 2070MHz.

Zotac 2070 Power Consumption:

To measure the power draw, I am taking a different route as HWInfo64 shows the GPU Power and this is exactly what I have been showing on my graphs instead of overall system power draw. To monitor the idle power draw, the system was left on idle for 30 minutes with closing as many background apps as possible and loading the Balanced Power Profile in the Windows. To monitor the maximum power draw, I am using The Witcher 3 4k run of 60 minutes and then record the reported power draw from the HWInfo64. This way any user can check their graphics card for power consumption easily.

This card like the other RTX graphics cards that I have tested was constantly hitting the power target. Increasing the power slider to 110% saw little improvement. A little more headroom in terms of power target could have been beneficial.

Thermal Performance:

I am not using Furmark or any other stress app for thermal performance checking. Instead, the reported temperatures are actually from the gaming session using The Witcher 3 at 4k resolution for minimum of 60 minutes. MSI Afterburner is used to record the temperatures during the gaming session. The ZOTAC GeForce RTX 2070 Amp Extreme Edition was idling at 40°C. On stock clocks, it maxed to 70°C and with overclocking it maxed to 73°C.

Zotac RTX Software:

Fire Storm is the name of the utility that ZOTAC provides with their graphics cards and this time they have revamped its design making it more user-friendly and simpler and this is what I am appreciating as well. The user can download the application from their website. SPECTRA is the name of the lighting solution provided on the RTX lighting enabled graphics cards.

The above picture shows the main interface of the application and a quick look alone suffices to tell how effective this new interface is. We have a ZOTAC logo on the top left side. Next, we have a fan circle showing the fan speed in %age. It has Auto, Manual, and Advanced modes.

The advanced mode will allow the user to create a custom fan curve profile based on the requirements. There is no Auto-stop function on this card.

The bottom circle on the main interface shows the GPU thermals.  ZOTAC GAMING is printed on the bottom left side. The main circle in the center is showing the Core Clock and Memory Clock in MHz. There is a listing of GPU1 up to GPU 4 on the right side of this circle. This allows the user to quickly switch to the respective graphics card in case of using multiple graphics cards. The user can save and load up to 3 profiles for each card.

The rightmost side shows the Advanced options to overclock the graphics card and to increase the power target/voltage. Clicking on the Default button will reset the graphics card’s settings to the factory defaults.

Clicking on Spectra will show the available lighting modes and options. There are 5 modes for this graphics card:

• Static
• Strobe
• Wave
• Breathe
• Cycle

Clicking on the Rainbow color circle will load a new window where the user can define any color from the spectrum and choose the intensity of the shade using the slider.

Clicking on the Settings icon will load the new interface. The first option allows the user to monitor the important parameters of the graphics card.

Next, we have various application related settings.

Information will show the Graphics card’s specifications much like the GPU-Z but in a lesser manner.

 

I have found the ZOTAC FireStorm application easy to use and without any hiccup. The OC Scanner is a new thing which would determine the optimal possible performance settings in a best manner for the user. Unfortunately, OC Scanner hanged my system without producing any result on every try.

Conclusion:

I have got to take a spin on my second RTX 2070 graphics card and this time it was from Zotac. The Zotac RTX 2070 Amp Extreme Edition is based on the TU106 SM. This is a factory overclocked card using a custom PCB. It is using 12nm technology with a die size of 448 mm² and packs 10800M transistors. It has 64 ROP and 144 TMU units with 2304 CUDA Cores or shader units.

The pixel fill rate is 119 GPixel/s and texture fill rate is 267.8 GTexture/s. This card has 8GB VRAM from Micron using GDDR6 with bus width of 256-bit and cap at 460.8 GB/s bandwidth. The base clock on this card is 1410MHz with boost clock of 1860MHz. The Zotac RTX 2070 Amp Extreme has a dimension of 308x113x57mm. It is effectively a 2.5 slot design as the shroud part extends over to the third slot. The graphics card features DirectX 12 API with 12_1 feature level and OpenGL standard of 4.5. No surprise there if it has no SLI support!

The design of the graphics card is following a wraparound approach which is what I have been looking for as it gives better and bold aesthetics. The shroud is made of the plastic but is quite sturdy. It mimics the ZOTAC’s brand logo in design from all aspects.

The ZOTAC GeForce RTX 2070 Amp Extreme Edition is featuring their Icestorm 2 cooling solution. It comprises of 3x 90mm fans designed for better static pressure and maximum airflow yet remaining at silent levels of the operations. Then there is a wide array aluminum based heat-sink which has more length than the PCB. It has 5x 8mm nickel-coated copper heatpipes making direct contact with the nickel-plated copper plate. The main copper plate is making contact with the GPU and the VRAM chips.

There are thermal pads between the copper plate and the VRAM chips. The ZOTAC was considerate enough to provide proper cooling solution for the VRMs as well. The all-new graphics card is also stronger in durability.

An additional die-cast metal jacket layer with full board coverage adds an integral structural strengthening and as a plus, additional heat dissipation for other components. Together with a redesigned wraparound backplate, it brings comprehensive support to the AMP EXTREME models for sheer protection. The really cool thing is the ability to control the fans independently. This feature is only available in a few selected graphics cards.

The ZOTAC GeForce RTX 2070 Review has 3x Display Ports 1.4, 1x HDMI 2.0b port and a USB Type-C port for the VR headsets. It has support for multiple displays (quad). It has a single 8-pin and a 6-pin power connector and is rated for 225W power. The minimum recommended PSU for the graphics card is 550W.

There is RGB LED lighting on this card. The ZotacGaming lights up on the top side of the shroud. I could not check for the power phases as I did not open the card due to restriction from the source. The ZOTAC GeForce RTX 2070 Amp Extreme Edition does not have any SLI finger or NVLink for that matter which is a design constraint from the Nvidia. The card supports DX_12 feature level 12_1, OpenGL up to 4.5 APIs.

Coming back to the topic, the graphics card was put to test 14 games using various APIs and at all three resolutions and DXR as well. In almost every game and synthetic test, it has outperformed the Asus Strix RTX 2070 OC though I would again emphasize that the Asus card was tested with 411.70 drivers whereas the Zotac RTX 2070 Amp Extreme has been tested with 430.86 drivers. I could not retest the Asus card due to its non-availability.

The Zotac RTX 2070 Review has performed very well overall though the performance hit is still in play with ray tracing enabled but the gap is reducing using the DLSS. Hopefully, the performance may improve in the coming time with improved drivers. We are thankful to the Zotac and PakDukaan for giving us the opportunity to RTX 2070 Review.

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