November 23rd, 2010
ASUS GeForce GTX 580 Review @ BenchmarkReviews
Voltage Tweak drives the NVIDIA Fermi GF110 GPU to 925 MHz and produces the most powerful DirectX-11 video card available.
ASUS is a well-known innovator of technology, but there are times when they recognize a good idea and strive to simply make it better. Queue the GeForce GTX 580 video card. Armed with the maximum number of CUDA cores and PolyMorph engines NVIDIA can deliver with the Fermi architecture, the GeForce GTX 580 represents their trophy effort to seize the performance market. While being similar to the GeForce GTX 480, the GeForce GTX 580 design updates the Fermi formula, improves upon the power appetite, reduces heat output, and increases graphical frame rate performance. ASUS raises the GF110 fixed function clock speed from 772 MHz to 782, while the graphics cores now operate at 1564 MHz. 1536MB of GDDR5 video frame buffer use a familiar 384-bit memory bus, clocked to 1002MHz for a 4008MHz data rate. This is before ASUS Voltage Tweak gives us access to unlocked potential…
Using ASUS Voltage Tweak technology and their SmartDoctor software utility, Benchmark Reviews drives GPU voltage from a pedestrian 962 mV at stock speed and overclocks the GF110 GPU by nearly 20% over reference speeds with 1145 mV. The ASUS GeForce GTX 580 competes on two levels: price point and GPU segment. Priced at the $520 price point, the ASUS ENGTX580 competes directly against ATI’s dual-GPU Radeon HD 5970 and a pair of AMD Radeon HD 6870 video cards combined into CrossFireX. In regard to single-GPU competition, the closest video cards would be ATI’s Radeon HD 5870 or NVIDIA’s own GeForce GTX 480.
