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- Date:
- Monday , December 20, 2010
- Author:
- Mark Warner
- Editor:
- Brent Justice
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ASUS ENGTX580 Video Card Review
The ASUS ENGTX580 packs NVIDIA's award-winning GeForce GTX 580 GPU inside, and it comes with a small factory overclock free of a price premium. The GTX 580 is certainly faster than the GTX 480 and the Radeon HD 5870, but what about a pair of Radeon HD 6870s in CrossFireX?
Introduction
ASUSTeK Computer Inc. is one of the largest and most successful computer hardware manufacturers in the world. A Taiwan-based company, they manufacture a wide variety of computer hardware, including motherboards, video cards, optical drives, notebooks, networking equipment, barebones desktop, and server systems, among many others. In 2008, they sold over 24 million motherboards, grossed 8.1 billion U.S., and won 3,056 awards from various enthusiasts and IT related outlets.
Today we are going to be taking a look at ASUS’s new NVIDIA GeForce GTX 580 based video card: the ENGTX580/2DI/1536MD5, hereafter referred to as the ASUS ENGTX580.
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 580
NVIDIA launched the GeForce GTX 580 (codename GF110) on November 9th, 2010 as a refresh to the embattled GeForce GTX 480. The GTX 480 had come under a considerable amount of justified fire, due to its late entrance into the DirectX 11 market, high power consumption, and high heat output. The GeForce GTX 580 is a refinement of the Fermi architecture, and is seen by many as being what the GTX 480 should have been.
The GeForce GTX 580 GPU packs 3 billion transistors on a 40nm manufacturing process. It features 512 CUDA cores, 64 texture units, and 48 ROPs. The GPU’s graphics core is clocked at 772MHz, while the CUDA cores are clocked at 1544MHz. The GTX 580 sports 1536MB (1.5GB) of GDDR5 memory on a 384-bit bus, which is clocked at 4008MHz. GF110 comes with a thermal design profile (TDP) of 244 Watts and a maximum thermal threshold of 97 degrees Celsius. It sports two dual-link DVI-I connectors and one HDMI connector, and requires the use of one 6-pin auxiliary power connector, and one 8-pin auxiliary power connector.
Though it has only a 6 Watt reduction in its TDP compared to the GeForce GTX 480, the GTX 580 is designed to be cooler and quieter than its older sibling. It accomplishes this by using a custom vapor chamber cooling device, also seen on the ATI Radeon HD 5970. Whereas the GTX 480 employed heat pipes, the GTX 580's vapor chamber is basically a large block of copper with thermally conductive liquid inside. The liquid boils, turns to vapor, and circulates around the copper block. As it circulates, it transfers its heat to the cooling device's fins, allowing for much more even distribution of heat, which then allows the cooling fan to run at a lower speed. This efficient design more effectively removes heat from the GPU while also reducing noise from the fan. This is a welcome change, as the GTX 480 was extremely loud under load conditions.
ASUS ENGTX580
ASUS’s new GeForce GTX 580 video card, the ENGTX580 comes with an MSRP of $529. It is a factory overclocked video card, but the overclock is not significant. The graphics core is overclocked by 10MHz, and the shader core by 20MHz. The memory is not overclocked out of the box. It supports Vcore voltage tweaking by way of ASUS’ SmartDoctor software for extended overclocking capabilities. Aside from the small overclock, the ASUS ENGTX580 is of NVIDIA’s reference design. It has the same PCB layout, the same cooling device, and the same output connectors.
The front of the ENGTX580’s box shows a winged and armored demonic-looking figure riding an armored horse in a menacing pose. The front shows some information that is needed to make an off-the-shelf purchasing decision. The back of the box shows the rest of the necessary information, as well as a features list printed in several languages and a fair amount of marketing material.
The inner box is a matte black carton with the ASUS logo and slogan embossed in gold foil letters. Inside the inner box are two smaller boxes containing the ENGTX580’s bundled accessories. The included accessories are a manual, driver and utility CD-ROM, a setup guide, and a dual-6-pin auxiliary power to single-8-pin auxiliary power adaptor.
The ENGTX580 is covered by a large black plastic heat-sink shroud. The majority of the surface is finished in a high-gloss shine. A large blower fan can be found at the back end of the video card. The fan sucks air in from around the video card, blows it through the cooler’s vapor chamber, and finally out of the business end of the video card through the vented PCI bracket. A silver ASUS logo sticker is affixed to the center of the front surface, and another ASUS logo decal is found on the top edge of the video card for showing off when installed in a windowed computer case. The ENGTX580 is 10.5" long, 4.5" tall, and 1.5" thick.
The back of the video card is uncovered, revealing a great many surface mount semiconductor devices and a few stickers.
The ASUS ENGTX580 requires the use of one 6-pin auxiliary power connector and one 8-pin auxiliary power connector. It has two SLI bridge connectors, indicating that it supports triple-SLI. At the business end, we find two dual-link DVI-I connectors and one mini-HDMI connector.
The Competition
For this evaluation, we are comparing the ASUS ENGTX580 to two different AMD video card options. First is the ATI Radeon HD 5970 2GB. For that video card, we are using AMD’s Catalyst 10.11 WHQL driver, as it is the latest driver recommended for the Radeon HD 5000 series by AMD. Second, we will be comparing the ENGTX580 with a CrossFireX solution featuring two AMD Radeon HD 6870 1GB video cards. For that video card, we are using AMD’s Catalyst 10.10e Hotfix driver. AMD recommends the 10.10e driver for the Radeon HD 6000 series, because optimizations specific to that GPU are in that driver.
Newegg lists the ASUS ENGTX580 for $524.99 USD. They have the ATI Radeon HD 5970 2GB video card for $499.99, and the AMD Radeon HD 6870 1GB for $199.99 after mail-in-rebate. Doubled up for CrossFireX, that brings the complete AMD Radeon HD 6870 CF solution up to $398 after rebate.