With the GPU battle between the two major chip manufacturers now ramping up after NVIDIA played a little catch-up when AMD was the first company to market with their DirectX 11 graphics cards, things are now a lot different. For close to a year now, the ball has been bouncing back and forth between the two which has again split the market relatively in two. While things are a little different, with the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 580 firmly in place as arguably the fastest single GPU card on the market. At this given time, the GeForce GTX 570 has rather been AMD's main rival for the Radeon HD 6970. Zotac was kind enough to provide a sample to verify the performance swing if pointing more to either companies. - TweakNews

Zotac GeForce GTX 570 Fermi Graphics Style Review

What you get from Zotac for about $350 is actually a GeForce GTX 570 which is following the reference design. The hardware kit was complete including two 6-pin power supply adapters. The Zotac GeForce GTX 570 does prove that it is a direct competitor with any reference based Radeon HD 6970 at this given time. Through benchmarking both video cards won and lost during certain benchmarks and in the end, we can't and will not say which one is better than the other. Regardless, Zotac's reference based version of the GeForce GTX 570 proved to be just a great graphics card and proved to work flawlessly right out of the box.

The only hindrance would have to be this reference cooler which doesn't seem to be up to the task if you would like to overclock and keep things quiet and cool. This is not something we can mark this card down for seeing there are other GeForce GTX 570 options in Zotac's lineup that have a better aftermarket cooler and thus should allow for an improved cooling and quieter operation. Most people going for a standard GeForce GTX 570 card in most cases won't be overclocking in the first place. However those who would will need to have some understanding to keep the heat in balance with the gained performance.