ASUS GTX580 DirectCU II SLI review

Final words and conclusion

As if the reference GTX 580 was not good enough just yet, ASUS made it better. And as if one card is not already breathtaking, we tested a freakish two of them in SLI mode.

From A to Z the product really surprised us in terms of overall design and features. The one thing we can not grasp though is why on earth did ASUS not factory-overclock this product ? I mean sure, there's nominal 10 MHz core frequency increase, but sheesh -- they might as well have left that 10 MHz tweak out, for a grand posture product like this is nearly dishonorable.

It boggles the mind as other brands out there also offer many SKUs that come pre-overclocked, and let's face it, the GTX 580 DCU-II was designed for exactly that purpose, getting the maximum out of it.

Regardless of me sniping that comment in of course, any game to date will play fine at the highest resolutions with a minimum of 4x Anti-aliasing enabled and the very best image quality settings. The latest titles will play perfectly on just one card, the true definitive benchmark however is Crysis WarHEAD in Enthusiast mode. That setting crippled any last generation card once you enabled it. At 1920x1200 at 2xAA and high quality settings in that Enthusiast gaming mode, this GTX 580 still pushes out an average framerate of 40 FPS, so this is the first single GPU solution that actually allows decent game play in what typically is horror for any GPU. And 71 FPS in SLI, sheesh.

Overclocking wise, we see impressive stuff, we got a tad higher than the reference clocks and internally we've already been testing voltage tweaks. So without it, this card should do 850 on the core perfectly fine. Voltage tweaked we can actually reach roughly 900 MHz to 950 MHz perfectly fine while your temperatures will remain fine, noise levels okay and and power consumption a good 80W higher (at 1.1v) , but that of course is a choice you make.

Alright, time to round up this review. The ASUS GTX 580 DirectCU-II is very impressive. It is amongst the fastest single GPU based graphics card series on the globe.

Regardless of pricing, it is a top notch card offering grand performance while this time around the other variables like noise and heat are well under control. Keep in mind that a spicy graphics card needs a spicy PC as well, make sure you have enough CPU horsepower under the hood, a proper PSU and hey any decent modern age quad-core processor will do just fine.

And if you decide to follow the path of SLI -- we'll you've seen the numbers, it's just ridiculous what a setup like this can do. Make sure you have the space, the proper components and the dough to make it happen though ! SLI performance scaling is just awesome if your PC has the right variables, and sure the drivers are really mature, we just had no issues.

Why SLI ? Good question, do you really need SLI with cards as powerful as any GeForce GTX 580 really is? Well, with current games and one monitor, the brute force that is the GeForce GTX 580 is plentiful, one card will do more than fine of course. It's always like this though, that x-factor, going that extra mile, you gotza have a little more e-peen, you are a record breaker or simply want the best. If you fall within that category then this might be something you should opt.
 

There's of course another reason you might want to look into SLI, and this is a very valid point: If you like to opt triple screen gaming with NVIDIA's Surround vision option, you will need a serious amount of rendering performance. Add to that if you have beefed up your game platform with 3D Vision, well that's where this feature eats away hefty on your framerate budget, that's where an SLI setup like this actually makes a lot of sense. And for surround vision, SLI is actually a mandatory requirement.

We can highly recommend the ASUS GTX 580 DirectCU-II for many reasons like performance, low noise levels and tweakability. In the end though 3-slot wide coolers might be the decisive factor for many of you to actually not purchase the product as yes, it eats away a lot of space. But if that is not an issue for you, the sky is the limit.

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