Overall and Final Verdict
One thing is for sure, Zotac didn’t skimp on materials when manufacturing the GTX 970 AMP! Omega. I love that they didn’t try to save money by going with a cheap and thin plastic fan shroud for this card. The entire fan shroud is a thick metal design. Add to that the machined aluminum panels on the fan shroud and the solid backplate as well you get a feeling of nothing but quality when holding the card. The downside though is all of the metal used makes this an extremely heavy card. With a lot of the weight at the top edge of the PCB I would be a little worried about making sure the card is secured and that it doesn’t put too much strain on the PCI slot as well. In addition to its weight, this is a big card. If you have a smaller case you will want to make sure that the height won’t be an issue. In addition to that you won’t want to run this in Mini-ITX builds or builds where the three slot design will cause issues. That means if you plan on running two in SLI you can’t run this on a Micro-ATX board for example.
The big size did allow Zotac to let the card run extremely quiet, even at 100% fan speed. Performance in both synthetic and In-Game was also equally impressive. If you are running at 1080p this card is most likely overkill or perfect if you are looking to take advantage of a high refresh rate monitor. At 1440p performance was good, but did leave room for improvement. Cooling performance did leave a little to be desired though. The numbers were better than what you would see with a reference cooler, but worse than what I saw with a few of our GTX 980’s with aftermarket coolers.
Given the recent attention, it should also be pointed out that while this is a 4 GB card, the way that Nvidia divided things up you only get access to 3.5 most of the time with the other half gig being used only when you need it. Testing at 1440p and a little at 4k I didn’t run into any issues but I can confirm that when using tools like GPUz you are only going to see the 3.5 gigs of ram, giving people reason to be a little worried originally.
Finding a price for the Zotac GTX970 AMP! Omega edition was actually a little hard, it seems that it is currently not really available in most places. I found one priced at 439.99 and seems to be the closest to normal price. That said this is a little more than what you can currently get any other GTX 970. You are getting a heavily overclocked/overclockable card with what I can only assume is a pricey all metal design. I would consider the all metal design to be worth a little over a standard GTX 970 but at that price it is a little more than I would want to spend on a GTX 970 as a whole. That said with GTX 980 pricing still well above this, there is still room to play before you getting into GTX 980 pricing. That means if a GTX 980 is out of your price range, the GTX 970 AMP! Omega is a nice premium card for you to look at..
