NVIDIA GeForce GTX 580

A top-end Fermi card done right, oh yes

We all knew the Northern Island graphics cards were coming from AMD this month - the Radeon HD 6850 and Radeon HD 6870. We had Dexter shipped out to Los Angeles to collect the cards, suffer a little at the vagaries of jetlag and come home and bench them to within an inch of their lives.


What we didn't know, and what no-one outside of AMD's rivals NVIDIA knew until manufacturers, such as Asus started leaking specs, was that NVIDIA was planning on launching its spoiler card much earlier than anyone expected.

Enter the GTX 580
And so I got the less glamourous location of NVIDIA's UK office in Theale to go and collect my card. We picked up the new GTX 580 the day before our current deadline and I can officially say, ‘damn, it's quick.' And it should be. These are the preliminary benchmarks.

Nvidia Geforce 580 GTX benchmarks

This is NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 480 replacement, a huge, monolithic, darned expensive card in its own right. So expect a price-tag of around £400, but this time around you're getting a top-end Fermi card done right.

The GTX 480 had to be a cut-back version of the full GF 100 chip, with only 480 CUDA cores as opposed to the 512 we were promised. Once we saw the revised architecture on the GTX 460 though we knew it wouldn't be long before we saw a full-fat, 512 CUDA-cored card come out.
What we're looking at here though is the vanguard of the 500 series of cards, and more are waiting in the wings.

The GF110 GPU inside the GTX 580, and the PCB itself, have been re-engineered from the transistor level up, based on the same lithography as the GF104 of the GTX 460. It's not a new production process, but we're looking at a chip that's faster, quieter and more fuel efficient than the previous monster card. Indeed, sat in a meeting with NVIDIA's Tom Petersen, Director of Technical Marketing, we had a rig running twin GTX 580s without blowing our eardrums out. Something you couldn't have done with a couple of GTX 480 roaring in the background of an otherwise quiet room.

Custom chamber
Core to the noise and cooling is a custom vapour chamber chilling the chip. As well as making the card cooler it's also lighter than the GTX 480's massive cooling array. It's even quieter than the previous generation of top-end cards too, namely the GTX 280 and GTX 285.And if you're looking for performance too you're in the right place. The GTX 580 easily outstrips it's older brother in any test. These are only preliminary figures, but the newer card is beating the GTX 480 by sometimes as large a margin as 34 per cent.

We have a full, in-depth review of the GTX 580 over on our big bro, TechRadar.com. The Cayman-powered, HD 6970, AMD's top-end card will also be on TechRadar very soon. Though Petersen maintains the GTX 580 should still have it beat.