Zotac GeForce GTX 580 Graphics Card Review

The end of the year is fast approaching and with the release of the 6900 Series cards now with us, the cards are now on the table to see who will have the fastest and more importantly the best all round card out of AMD and Nvidia. Nvidia have taken the chance whist in-between Radeon launches to put their latest contender forward in the form of the GeForce GTX 580.

Nvidia are fully aware that AMD’s Cayman cards are designed to outperform the GTX 480 and this poses a large problem for them. The GTX 480 is a naturally hot running card that also has a hunger for power. There is only so much that the rushed and crippled design has to give and so the decision has been made to take a step back to make two steps forward in improving the new Fermi architecture.

In an attempt to tame the cards temperature from the 480’s design, Nvidia have lost the heatpipe design that was in hindsight not fully up to the job and replaced this with a new vapour chamber designed heatsink. This along with a redesigned fan that is now around 5dB quieter, and that has also a quieter pitch than the squeaky fan of the 480. The new fan also pushes far more air in and through the heatsink in comparison to the old.

We also see thanks to the improved cooling – higher stock clock speeds, 32 more shader cores & one more PolyMorph engine, bilinear filtering speed has been doubled and finally improved power management means that even though the card runs faster, the card has 6W TDP less than the 480.

Its improvements all round!