Product Showcase GeForce GTX 580 Lightning XE

There's a lot going on the backside of the card. Above you can spot NEC Proadlizers (Prompt, Broadband, Stabilizer) capacitors which offer ultra-high capacitance ratings. Basically they clean up the power signal creating better stability and more overclock potential.

If we zoom in at the PCB a little deeper to the left we can see phase activity LEDs, that's twelve power phases.

Here we connect a V-point cable to the header, now you can use any kind of multi-meter to measure either the GPU or memory voltage. It's rather excessive for the regular user, but there are LN2 overclockers out there that feel something wiggle in their pants right now.

An interesting detail is that when the card gets warmer the center core of the fans will slowly change it's color to white, the whiter the core appears to be, the hotter the card will be. In the photo above all the way to the lower right we (deliberately) heated up the card toward 90 Degrees C, it is one of these funny additions to the product that makes it really unique. It remains a very subjective indicator though as the fan, and thus ambient temperature needs to heat up, that's what the fan reacts to.

Once the ambient air has been used to cool the GPU, the hot air will be blown outside the PC, partly though, so you do need to make sure that you have proper ventilation inside the PC chassis.