Overclocked GeForce GTX 480 AMP! and 470 AMP! revealed by Zotac

Zotac has today announced the launch of its first overclocked AMP! Edition GeForce GTX 400-series graphics cards.

The new Zotac GeForce GTX 470 AMP! and GeForce GTX 480 AMP! editions come with higher clockspeeds than the originals, improved cooling and a reworked PCB to make it all possible.

If you've already stumped up the cash for one of the vanilla flavoured 400-series cards, don't panic just yet though – the clockspeeds on these bad boys have only been nudged north by around 50MHz or so to 756MHz on the 480 and 656MHz on the 470.

That's enough to make them just about the fastest GeForce-based cards on the market (if you can find one), but not enough for you to even speculate about the merest possibility of upgrading.

No, it's the reworked cooling that might be these cards' real selling point. GeForce 400-series cards run very hot indeed, which means that air-cooled PCs that contain them tend to have a soundtrack that sounds a bit like, 'BBBRRRMMMMM…'

That's doubly so with the GTX 480, which frankly, snores louder than a fat grandad with a blocked nose.

The revamped cooling on these new cards features a new heatsink with a pure copper base, with heat pipes attached to pure aluminium fins. That, combined with two 92mm fans, offers what Zotac calls a 'perfect balance of noise and performance'.

Until we test these cards, we can't say with any certainty how quiet they're going to be, but you'd hope that even with the higher clockspeeds, the DB level will be less than on the original boards – especially the GTX 480.

There's no word yet on pricing, but you can expect to pay a small premium on top of the already-hefty asking price of the standard cards.

Stay tuned for the forthcoming TechRadar reviews.

Specs:

• Pure copper base and heat-pipes and pure aluminum fin heatsink
• Dual 92mm quiet high-performance fans
• Dual dual-link DVI-I outputs
• Mini HDMI 1.3a output
• PCI Express 2.0 interface (Compatible with 1.1)
• DirectX 11 with Shader Model 5.0 compatible
• OpenGL 3.2 compatible
• NVIDIA 3D Vision Surround ready
• NVIDIA CUDA & PhysX ready
• NVIDIA PureVideo HD technology
• Microsoft DirectX 11 & DirectCompute ready

ZOTAC GeForce GTX 480 AMP! Edition

• Engine clock: 756 MHz
• 480 Unified Shaders
• Shader clock: 1512 MHz
• 1536MB GDDR5 memory
• 384-bit memory interface
• Memory clock: 3800 MHz

ZOTAC GeForce GTX 470 AMP! Edition

• Engine clock: 656 MHz
• 448 Unified Shaders
• Shader clock: 1312 MHz
• 1280MB GDDR5 memory
• 320-bit memory interface
• Memory clock: 3402 MHz