Gigabyte GeForce GTX 580 SO review - Product Showcase

Product Showcase GeForce GTX 580

So, above you can see the GeForce GTX 580, the Gigabyte SO/SOC model. It will become available for roughly 499 USD/475 EUR. We received the card straight from the factory hence we do not have any photo's on packaging and bundle. You'll receive all the regulars like manual, driver CD, DVI converter and PCIe PEG power converter to cable though.

Overall a nice and dark looking card, I wish Gigabyte would let go of the blue PCB color and go for black though, blue is just not a proper color theme anno 2011. Let's look at the card from several different viewpoints. The GTX 580 card is quite good looking. Check out the WindForce 3X cooling, BTW; a cooling block on the GPU leads directly to aluminum fins through heatpipes, where the three fans will blow air to cool it down. The cooling works excellently, but the biggest plus... it's very silent as our tests will show you.

The GeForce GTX 580 comes with 1536 MB memory, this SOC model as well and I know many of you would have preferred a 3GB version of this card.

The reference card is clocked at a 772 MHz core frequency, 1544 MHz on the shader processors and the GDDR5 memory runs at 4000 MHz (effective). This SOC card runs at a much more impressive 855 MHz on the core, 1710 on the shaders and 4100 MHz on the memory. That should bring in a little extra performance, and in fact this is to be the fastest factory clocked GTX 580 to date.

Connectivity wise, we see two dual-link DVI connectors supporting all high-resolution monitors and all the way to the left you can see a mini-HDMI connector.

Here we can see the backside. The card measures roughly 27cm in length. Overall, a clean blue PCB, LOTS of smaller components though. We'll discuss some of them in a later stage.

The GeForce GTX 580 has a maximum power consumption of give or take 250 Watts, as such you'll need to power the card with one 8-pin and one 6-pin PCIe PEG connector from your power supply. 600 Watt will suffice, but we recommend a 700W power supply to start with especially with overclocking in mind, and that is with one card of course.

Like any high-end GeForce graphics card, NVIDIA will allow you to opt for the multi-GPU road with SLI as an option. You can pair two or three cards in one PC and have them do a decent workout.