A Closer Look
As I said before, this card is visually identical to the RTX 3080 Trinity we reviewed just a few day ago. That’s no bad thing though, as it’s still a large triple fan cooler design with a huge heatsink; more than enough to tame the RTX 3080, and I expect it’ll do just fine with the RTX 3090 too, as the power consumption isn’t a whole lot higher.
The fans are really nice though, and all come with Active Fan Control, allowing each to adjust their speed independently. This also includes their FREEZE Fan Stop, allowing the fans to shut off entirely in lower loads and temperatures, giving you a much quieter computer.
The card uses a metal shroud that’s pretty funky, but not too crazy. It’s still a gaming GPU, but they’ve kept the design fairly toned down. Especially for a Zotac card, which often look completely nuts. However, this is one of the more affordable variants, so perhaps we’ll see something crazy when they unleash their tricked out and overclocked cards.
Along the side of the card, you’ll find a little touch of RGB, not a lot, but enough to garnish the aesthetics.
The card draws power from a dual 8-pin configuration, with Zotac claiming a 350W consumption and a 750W PSU as the minimum recommended.
There’s a full size backplate on the rear of the card too, which comes with an extra touch of RGB in the Zotac logo. The backplate looks great too, with some cool ventilation grooves cut into it. I’m not sure if they’ll improve performance, but I do like the design regardless.
Finally, at the rear of the card, you can see the card sits in a 2.5 slot form factor. It also does not extend beyond the PCIe bracket, so the card is quite narrow unlike a lot of modern gaming GPUs that are as wide as a mountain.
