Asus GeForce GTX580

Full Review

After AMD fired a salvo with its Radeon 6850/6870 graphics cards for the mainstream, Nvidia jumped into the war with its GeForce GTX580 for the high-end segment. The GTX580 was codenamed the GF110, as against the GTX480 which was codenamed GF100. This core is still based on the Fermi architecture, and does not add any particularly new features that would catch the consumer's attention. What it does bring to the table, is a tangible amount of increased performance, lower power consumption and lower temperatures.

The GeForce GTX580 can lay claim to being done right, and therefore the card that the GTX480 could have been.

So it is a minor improvement for sure, but remember that is an improvement over what is already the best single-GPU graphics solution in the consumer market. It manages to lead the list, even improving upon the performance turned in by overclocked GeForce GTX480 graphics cards. The GTX580 still does not particularly favour DisplayPort, and its DirectX 11 performance has improved a bit with the 32 extra CUDA cores (512 now, as against 480 cores in the GTX480). Clock and memory speeds have also been increased.

At least in a minor way, the GeForce GTX580 can lay claim to being done right, and therefore the card that the GTX480 could have been. However, it has been about a year since AMD/ATi launched its Radeon 5000 series of GPUs for graphics cards. AMD has already released its Radeon 6850 and 6870, with the top-end single-GPU Radeon 6970 expected to be available quite soon. AMD's upcoming high-end Radeon offering may or may not actually chug past the GeForce GTX580 in performance. However, if a big lead over AMD is what Nvidia wanted, a year has been lost to perfecting the architecture while their competitor continues the assault with products that offer decent performance at good prices.

Specifications
Asus lost no time in bringing a version of the GeForce GTX580 to market which is not only factory-overclocked, but also offers plenty of voltage tweaking headroom. Enthusiasts can further overclock using Nvidia's own System Tools and the Asus software provided - SmartDoctor and GamerOSD. This graphics card has 1.5 GB of GDDR5 video memory clocked at 1002 MHz and a GPU core clocked at 782 MHz (10 MHz higher than the stock speed). It has a 384-bit memory interface and 512 cores that support OpenGL 4.1 and DirectX 11.



The table below shows how the specifications of the stock GeForce GTX580 differs from the older GTX480, and competing cards, the Radeon 5870 (single-GPU) and Radeon 5970 (dual-GPU).


The GPU comparison table above pits specifications of the GTX580 against its peers. 

Design
The Asus GeForce GTX580 (ENGTX580/2DI/1536MD5) is largely a reference designed graphics card by Nvidia, through and through. The dual-slot cooler is hidden behind a black covering, with only the fan being visible. The fan clearly kept the card well-cooled, as the GPU temperature was very decent for a high-end card. The fan never did get noisy unlike the reference GTX480. Though long, the card does not quite look threatening, commendable for a top-end product.



The cooling system is closed for the most part, and the grilled heat vents at the rear throw heat out. It is targeted at high-end desktop computers (gaming / rendering professionals). So the type of PC cabinet and power supply required should have already been taken care of, so not much to think about on that front. Power input connectors on the card, ask for one 8-pin and one 6-pin PCI-E power input.

Package Contents
Display outputs at the rear were aligned in one row, to allow a full row for the heat vents. The output ports consisted of one mini-HDMI port and two DVI ports. This probably was a bit too basic, for a card of the stature of the GTX580 and the profile of the kind of user who'd want it.


Want multi-monitor beyond two, or DisplayPort? You're out of luck.

The package we received had no port adapters except for the mini-HDMI to HDMI port adapter. But there was a SpeedSetup guide, a CD with drivers and manual, and one 8-pin PCI-E power input connector connecting to two 6-pin PCI-E connectors. Latest versions of Asus diagnostic and tweaking software (GamerOSD, Smart Doctor) can be downloaded from the website.

Performance
To prevent bottle-necks as much as possible, the test-bed consisted of an Intel Core i7 965 processor, Intel DX58SO motherboard, Intel X25-M 80GB SSD, 3GB of Kingston DDR3-2000MHz HyperX RAM, Tagan BZ-1300W PSU and Windows 7 Ultimate. We used the latest driver available at the time of testing, for the GeForce GTX580 - Nvidia ForceWare v263.09 WHQL.

The graphs here show only performance numbers as seen at the default speeds set by Asus, and selected from a wider set of tests conducted. To put the results in context and help you compare, we juxtapose its benchmark scores with two other top-end graphics cards. These are the previous generation card, MSI GeForce GTX480 Lightning, and the dual-GPU Radeon 5970 from the opposing camp.

Below is a graph of how the Asus ENGTX580 card fared in synthetic benchmarks:




Below is a graph of gaming performance seen in higher-end usage patterns.



Among the top-end cards chosen for temperature comparison, the Asus GTX580 ran relatively cool in normal gaming patterns. However, FurMark pushes it to the brink such that the temperature cut-off kicks in, so you see such a high temperature at full load. Notably, the Asus GeForce GTX580 just refused to become as noisy as the other cards, preferring to run a higher temperature instead (which we presume it is engineered to tolerate for long periods of time).

Bottom Line

A single-GPU GTX580 is able to challenge the dual-GPU and performs better too, when all things are considered including power drawn. It is already priced very competitively, at Rs. 30,500 and is the obvious choice for those building a new gaming machine. Being friendly to overclockers, doing some OC on the card can improve scores even further.

The picture becomes a bit murkier for those who already have a high-end gaming machine, with a graphics card of the class of a GeForce GTX480 or dual Radeon 5870 in CrossFire. In such cases, an upgrade may not be warranted, at least not without waiting to see what the Radeon 6970 has to offer.


Related graphics card reviews
Zotac GeForce GTX480
MSI N480GTX Lightning
ATI Radeon HD 5870
ATI Radeon HD 5970
PCW Top 5 Mainstream PC Graphics Cards