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- Date:
- Tuesday , November 09, 2010
- Author:
- Brent Justice
- Editor:
- Kyle Bennett
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NVIDIA GeForce GTX 580 Video Card Review
The GeForce GTX 580 heralds a huge comeback by NVIDIA to deliver the best DX11 gaming experience. The fastest single-GPU performance, a cooler running GPU and quiet? Is this Fermi combination possible? We explore all of this as we compare it to the GeForce GTX 480 and Radeon HD 5870.
Temperature, Power & Sound
My name is Kyle Bennett, and I have a confession to make. I am a GeForce GTX 480 SLI owner. I am not very proud of that fact because there are some stupid sacrifices to be made in order to actually use this GPU combination. Trust me, I speak from experience. This year I have transitioned from Radeon 5870, to Radeon 5970, to Radeon 5870 CrossFire, and finally to GeForce GTX 480 SLI. GTX 480 SLI is so hot and loud that I went the extra mile and found the perfect chassis for these beasts. And while the Silverstone Raven II chassis did wonders in terms of making GTX 480 SLI tolerable to my ears, it did little to quell the mass amounts of heat rolling out of the case. Gaming on the GTX 480 SLI configuration amounts to have a space heater under your desk. It can raise the temperature in my office almost 10 degrees if left running overnight, and that is with the AC on! I finally went as far as to construct a ducting system under my desk to channel the belching wave of heat in a direction other than my own. Not too many things can break me away from a good round of Civ5, but a 500 watt blow dryer pointed up your thighs can make you call it a night fairly quickly.
When NVIDIA came to us and started telling us about the GTX 580, I was honestly not too concerned with the performance advantages the company was touting, but rather I was most interested in its claims about the GTX 580 being a cooler running and quieter card.
Rather than the usual graphs and charts we post about power, heat, and sound I thought I would relate my personal experience here. This change in format may not be your cup of tea, but I thought it would either tell the true story behind GTX 580 or show the new beast's true color.
Heat
What I have done here is try my best to show you true temperature variations I have seen and felt in my own system at home. What I have done is transition from a GTX 480 SLI setup to a GTX 580 SLI setup in my personal system. Below the graphics represent actual temperature changes I saw in my office environment.
The graphic above represents my GTX 480 SLI system compared with my GTX 580 SLI system at idle. The wood represents the top of my desk and my system is perched underneath it. Due to the Raven II's configuration, the exhaust from the chassis blows up and out from the top of the case rather than the back like in most ATX configurations. The temperatures you see were taken with our trusty old infrared thermometer on the floor surface where the case's air intake is, then on the top outer edge of the case under the motherboard tray (out of the direct airflow in the chassis), and then on the top of the grill where the video cards exhaust through. The final number on top is the actual surface temperature of the top of my desk. It is a heavy desk, I can walk on it without any structural issues. There is approximately 7 inches between the top of the Raven II and the underside of the desk's surface.
As you will note, the exhaust temperature of the GTX 580 SLI at idle is 13 degrees F less than the GTX 480 SLI. Simply put there is a lot less hot air pouring out of my chassis now as I sit there typing away at articles like these. Not that the GTX 480 SLI was not tolerable at idle usage, but you sure as hell knew those cards were still there. As for wattage pull at the wall, I am seeing about 5% less wattage with the GTX 580 SLI than I was with the GTX 480 SLI.
But what happens when you actually use the cards?
The temperatures represented here are what I saw after and hour of gaming with Mafia 2. You can see the obvious temperature differences, but the most important number on the page is the intake temperature. You will notice with the GTX 580 SLI, we have a the same ambient room temperature we started with at the intake; 74F. With the GTX 480 SLI you will see that the ambient in the room has risen 5 degrees F....AT THE FLOOR. These numbers were taken with my office door closed, the office is about 13'x15', with the ceiling fan off, but the AC still running. The GTX 480 SLI had no problems raising the temperature in my office by 5 to 8 degrees F after gaming with it for a couple of hours. While the exhaust temperatures do not vary greatly between the GTX 580 SLI and the GTX 480 SLI, the GTX 580 SLI is not pumping out near as many CFMs of blazing hot air as the GTX 480 SLI did. GTX 480 SLI was truly a blessing and a curse. You got awesome SLI scaling that blows 5870 CrossFire out of the water, but you just had to dress in a Speedo to be able to enjoy the eye candy and the frame rates.
So instead of getting all scientific on you here, I thought I would relate my personal story. The bottom line on GTX 580 and heat is this; it is not nearly as friggin' hot as those direct-from-hell GTX 480s. Yes, the GTX 580 is still not cool in any sense of the word, but it is not the 10,000 BTU space heater that the GTX 480 is. I am getting much better frame rates in my games with GTX 580 SLI and I now don't have to roll the box fan in from the garage to ventilate my office when I play games.
Sound
The GTX 580 is damn near silent in terms of discreet graphics cards. Yes, you can hear them, but even my GTX 580 SLI setup under full load is only 52db at 2.5 feet away. My external hard drive enclosure is actually louder than my video cards. My office has not been this quiet since the stock HD 5870 and I dare say it is even quieter now. Still a lot of that is owed to the tremendous airflow supplied by the Raven II.
Power
In all honesty, I have not been able to see more than a couple of percent at best difference when playing games between the GTX 580 SLI and the GTX 480 SLI. The 480 SLI system would pull about 715 watts at the wall under load, and the 580 SLI system would pull about 700 watts under the same condition. So there is really no power savings with GTX compared to GTX 480, but the GTX 580 is sure more efficient about its usage.
Pictures
I know Brent went into detail into the GTX 580's cooling mechanism earlier, but I thought I would show you a few pictures of the unit broken down as well as install in my Raven II. As you can see below, the cooling system is rather simplistic...but effective. Another design queue worth noting is that these cards do not have intake vents on the end like the previous design. You can see where the fan is fully ducted off only allowing air intake from the side. Accordingly, NVIDIA has put a nice slant of the face of the card's enclosure to allow air to "get in between" cards if you have these mounted right next to each other as is done in my chassis. (That is a GTX 260 in between the 580 cards that is used as a dedicated PhysX card.)
There is no doubt that the GTX 580 is a big upgrade from the GTX 480 if you take into consideration the entire package. If you are a deaf Eskimo, your mileage may vary.