Gainward Nvidia GTX 580 review

Courtesy of Evetech and AMD, we have over the past few weeks been inundated with graphics cards to review. Just this year we have already reviewed a Radeon HD 6870,  Radeon HD 6950 , Radeon HD 6970, and our favourite so far, a Gainward Nvidia GTX 570 Phantom Edition.

Today we turn our attention to Nvidia’s current single GPU performance king, the GTX 580. The GTX 580 first appeared locally late last year, and began selling at just over R5,000 – a price point which it has yet to budge from. This is a massive amount of money to pay for a single component, but then Nvidia was quick to point out that the GTX 580 was the fastest single-GPU graphics card in the world at the time of launch.

The GTX 580 is, loosely speaking, an updated GTX 480. While the GTX 480 was a monster performer, it was slated for being extremely noisy, power-hungry, and for running very hot. Nvidia subsequently went back to the drawing board, and with the GTX 580 has been able to come out with a card that requires less power, runs cooler, and manages to increase the GTX 480’s shader processor count and clock speeds.

How do these tweaks effect the end-user experience when playing games with the GTX 580? The average gamer will look at a handful of core variables when considering a graphics card: price, performance, noise levels, temperature levels and features. These are what we will be paying close attention to in the following review.

Performance

As illustrated by the following benchmarks, the GTX 580 is simply the fastest single-GPU graphics card in the world. It easily beats AMD’s cheaper Radeon HD 6970 in most games, and it does so by a fair margin.

Benchmarks

All benchmarks were run on the same PC, with the only changing variable being the graphics card. CCleaner along with Driver Sweeper were used to make sure there were no left over files clogging up the registry. Each of the benchmarks were run three times to ensure consistent results. All benchmarks were run at 1920×1200, with all settings set as high as possible, including anti aliasing settings in order to push the cards to their respective limits. The scores in the graphs below indicate the average frames per second achieved in each benchmark.

Benchmark rig

AMD Phenom II [email protected], 8GB DDR3 1333MHz RAM, Gigabyte GA-MA790FXT-UD5P motherboard, Windows 7 64-bit

Bad Company 2

We benchmarked the game’s intro engine driven cinematic footage to get a score here.

Bad Company 2 is still a very technically impressive game, and the GTX 580 did not disappoint, out-stripping the nearest competitor by around 20 frames per second, and thrashing AMD’s HD 6970 by almost 30 frames per second.

S.T.A.L.K.E.R: Call of Pripyat

The S.T.A.K.E.R Call of Pripyat benchmark is capable of pushing even the most powerful hardware, and illustrates nicely the differences between various graphics cards. The GTX 580 was once again the top performer, easily beating the HD 5970 by a noticeable margin.

Starcraft II

StarCraft II is one of the most played PC games in the world, and is able to run on a wide variety of hardware. For some reason, AMD’s HD 6970 performs remarkably well in StarCraft II, however, the GTX 580 was able to beat it by a negligible handful of frames per second.

Our benchmark tests, as well as multiple other benchmarks from around the internet confirm that the GTX 580 is the fastest single GPU graphics card in the world. In the majority of games it outstrips the HD 6970 by a fair margin, and is able to consistently nudge out a solid performance lead against Nvidia’s cheaper GTX 570.

Noise and temperature

The Gainward GTX 580 uses Nvidia’s reference vapour chamber cooling design. At idle it is very quiet, but naturally as the fans kick in during game play, the GPU heats up.

We found the card would max out at about 85 degrees C under heavy load over prolonged periods of time, which is hot to the touch, but pretty much what one would expect from a card which offers this sort of performance. At this point, the fans are quite loud, but again, we expect this sort of thing from a high-end card.

Importantly, the GTX 580 is not nearly as loud as the outgoing GTX 480 which many criticised for being obscenely loud. It creates roughly the same noise as the much less powerful Radeon HD 6870, and is the quietest high-end card that Nvidia has released in years.

While it does run hot, and the fan becomes noticeably audible, it is not out of line with what we would expect from a card in this segment. Ideally we would like a completely silent high-end graphics card, but bar water cooling, this is simply not possible with today’s technology.

With that in mind, the noise and temeperature generated by the GTX 580 are tolerable, but may not be ideal in certain situations.

Whether or not you will be willing to part with this sort of cash for a single component will be up to you. It is the fastest card available for under R5,000, but with the R3,599 GTX 570 Phantom Edition nipping so closely at its heals in terms of performance, it is hard to recommend it.

While the GTX 580 is blisteringly fast and reasonably quiet, there are cheaper cards that will also be able to provide excellent frame rates at up to 1920×1200 with all settings maxed. The reality is that when you’re fragging noobs online in Bad Company 2, the difference between 65 frames per second and 90 frames per second is simply not noticeable, and therefore, paying over R1,000 extra for the priveladge may simply not be wise.

However, there is certainly value in a card like this if you’re running a high resolution monitor (1920×1200+), or even if you simply want to future proof yourself for the next 4 years of new games.

Pros

– Fastest graphics card for under R5000

– Fastest single GPU graphics card

– Not as noisy as the outgoing GTX 480

Cons

– Expensive, and whether or not the extra performance is justified is a debatable

– Still a bit louder than many would like

Score: 4/5

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