nVidia's GTX580 Hits the Streets and Leaves an Impact

The GTX 580 
nVidia GeForce GTX 580 follows the same style of design as the GeForce 4xx series, at least on the surface.  Inside the silicon is another story. We find the typical dual DVI ports and the single Mini-HDMI 1.4a port. Above this is a grill for ventilation/exhaust of the hot air generated by the GPU and memory.  

For power you get a single 6-pin PCIe power port along with an 8-pin one. It is just over 10.5 inches long and to be painfully honest not much to talk about when it is just sitting on your desk.

The Test System Build and Comments
Processor: Intel Core i7 975 Extreme
Mainboard Asus P6X58D Premium [Supplied by ASUS]
Memory: 6GB Kingston KHX12800D3T1K3/6GX [Supplied by Kingston]
Hard Disk: Patriot 128GB Torqx SSD [Supplied by Patriot]
Graphics Cards: GeForce GTX580 [Supplied by nVidia]
Graphics Cards: Asus EAH5870 V2 S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Call of Pripyat Edition [Supplied by ASUS]
MSi N465GTX Twin Frozr II [Supplied by MSi]
eVGA GTX480 Hydro Copper [Supplied by eVGA]
ASUS EAH5850TOP DirectCU [Supplied by ASUS]
AMD Radeon HD 5870 [Supplied by AMD]
AMD Radeon HD 5970 [Supplied by AMD]
Zotac GTX 285 AMP! Edition 1GB [flashed to stock BIOS] [Supplied by Zotac]


Heat Generation and Power
As we mentioned before the cooling has been beefed up on the GTX580. nVidia also improved the power regulation on the 580 too. These two combine to make sure that you are getting a more efficient GPU than the GTX480. Then again the GTX480 was something of a pig when it came to power consumption and heat generation.   

As with most GeForce GPUs the GTX580 has hardware to monitor the temperatures generated by the GPU and to throttle it down to prevent damage to it. Starting with the GTX580 nVidia has thrown in some real time voltage monitoring hardware to help prevent the possibility of damage due to the card drawing too much voltage. This is not one part but one part for each of the two 12-Volt connections.  These two circuits are monitored by the drivers and can dynamically adjust the voltage if an app tries to draw too much.

To see what types of temperatures we could get we ran Furmark and found that we hit a max temp of 87C during a 1920x1200 run @ x16 MSAA. This is actually a little down from our previous temperature mark of 89C with the GeForce GTX480 on the same run. But, let’s be honest it is not that much off the mark.

***Note, we do not remove the cooling for photographing the PCB until after all testing is done. This prevents any discrepancies in heat generation readings. All add-in graphics cards are tested as they arrive from the factory.

Overclocking
Unfortunately our time with the GTX580 was a little on the short side. We were not able to get too deep into the overclocking side of things before we had to starting putting the article together. We are currently working on pushing the GTX580 in addition to looking much deeper into the Tessellation performance that nVidia is boasting of. We will get that up to you as quickly as we are able to.

***Overclocking is always going to be a hit and miss thing. The speeds that we are able to reach do not indicate what all cards are capable of. We can show you potential only, your speeds will vary based on the systems you use and the individual cards purchased.