Gainward Nvidia GTX 570 Phantom Edition review

If you read my review of AMD’s HD 6970 last week, then you will already be familiar with Gainward’s GTX 570 Phantom Edition, as it was my primary comparison card given its similar price point. 

The Phantom Edition takes the already beefy Nvidia GTX 570, and sticks a custom cooler on it. It is also slightly overclocked, which gives it a performance edge over the vanilla edition. The real beauty, however, is the price point. While the regular edition of the card can typically be found for between R3,700 and R4,000, Evetech, who kindly provided us with the review sample, has the Phantom Edition available for R3,599, making it perhaps the cheapest GTX 570 available in SA.

As is illustrated by the above table, the performance tweaks to the GTX 570 are negligible, and we certainly would not advise paying a premium for them. However, considering that this card is available locally for less than the regular edition, it is definitely worth considering. 

The GTX 570 Phatom Edition measures in at 267 millimeters, which is identical to the reference design, and pretty much the same size as other current generation high-end graphics cards. Like the AMD Radeon HD 5900 series, you will need a fair amount of space in your case to mount this bad boy. You will also need a decent power supply. At the very least you will need a good quality 550W PSU to run this card.

When looking at high-performance cards, a key feature for many will be noise pollution. Many gamers don’t care how loud their PC gets when they play, however, for those that do, the Phantom Edition’s custom cooling system does an impressive job delivering monster performance without getting too loud.

To the naked ear, the card is noticeably softer than the reference GTX 580 we had to test. While we didn’t have any high-tech noise measuring hardware on hand, we did have a handy iPhone app called dB Meter Pro which measures decibels. Although not the most accurate measurement in the world, it was at least accurate for comparative purposes within our review case study. We found the GTX 570 Phantom Edition to deliver an identical audio footprint to that of the GTX 580 and HD 6970 at idle. Under load, however, it maintained its composure better than both cards, only becoming a few decibels louder than its idle sound while the others showed a significant increase in audio pollution. It also remained fairly cool, increasing from around 35 °C idling to around 65 °C under load. In comparison, the HD 6970 topped out at about 80°C and the GTX 580 at around 85°C.

So in terms of heat and noise, the GTX 570 Phantom Edition is an attractive prospect. But how was its performance? We ran a series of benchmarks to determine just how well the card performs with a broad selection of games.

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. The GTX 570 used was an overclocked Gainward Phantom Edition supplied by Evetech.

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 seems to prefer Nvidia cards, and the GTX 570 outclassed its slightly more expensive rival, while getting impressively close to its big brother, the GTX 580.

Batman: Arkham Asylum

Arkham Asylum delivers great visuals while maintaining fantastic frame rates even at high resolutions. For some reason, AMD’s cards seem to be favoured here, with the HD 6970 notching out a few extra frames over the GTX 570. 

Dawn of War II: Chaos Rising

While delivering very playable frame rates, both Nvidia cards seemed to struggle with Chaos Rising a bit, struggling to break 55 frames per second. AMD cards performed slightly better across the board, although the frame rate difference was really negligible. 

Dirt 2

Dirt 2 remains one of the most visually pleasing and demanding games on PC. The GTX 570 put around 10 frames per second difference between itself and the HD 6970, and got about as close to the GTX 580. We were very impressed with its performance in this benchmark.