ZOTAC GeForce GTX 770 2GB Pro Reviews

The GeForce GTX 770 established itself as the weapon of choice for gamers in the $400 segment. ZOTAC's GTX 770 uses a GTX 680 AMP! Edition PCB but comes at GTX 770 reference design clocks, yet the card is 2% faster than the NVIDIA board when averaged over our benchmarks. It seems as though ZOTAC optimized their cooler's temperatures to run below 80°C most of the time, which lets the GPU sustain boost clocks better. The new cooler looks pretty nice if you ask me and does an OK job at keeping the card cool, but I would have wished for slightly lower temperatures and noise levels. Idle noise is great, though, making the card almost inaudible outside of games. For its performance class, gaming noise is good too, but other GTX 770s we've tested before do better here, especially the MSI GTX 770 Gaming.

The Zotac GTX 770 is a great card. True, it really feels like an GTX 680 on steroids and some might feel it is deception from Nvidia to call it GTX 770 since it is so similar to the GTX 680. But if we are honest there is not much to complain about. What Nvidia has done is to take the top single-GPU card of the previous generation, added some more performance, updated it with new features and then rebranded it as a mid-end card in the new series. And we should be fine with that because it offers us consumers a lot of value. Even though we might have preferred the stock cooler of the GTX Titan and GTX 780, which is used on the reference GTX 770, we can’t deny that the “dual-silencer” cooler works well and keeps the card cool without making much noise. The included Splinter Cell-bundle is also nice. What impresses us even more is that the price of the Zotac GTX 770 is around $399 while a Zotac GTX 680 from the same e-tailer (Newegg) cost $460 or even more. So basically we get more features, more performance for a lower price. We of course do not think anyone with a GTX 680 would like to upgrade, the difference is not big enough – that is what the GTX 780 is for, but for GTX 670-owners this card is a great upgrade.