Product Showcase

Honestly we expected 4GB, but the card will come with two GB of graphics memory, that's definitely sufficient if you are a hardcore gamer with a monitor resolution of 1920x1200. If you plan to game on triple monitors then 4 GB models would be my preference though, as that would definitely help you out in the uber high resolutions and hefty AA combinations. Perhaps just like the 580 series the future will see a Lightning "Extreme' edition card with it's memory doubled up.

All Kepler family graphics cards are PCIe gen 3.0 compatible. Going from PCIe Gen 2 to Gen 3 doubles the bandwidth available to the add-on cards installed, from 500 MB/s per lane to 1 GB/s per lane. The backside shows a nice meshed backplate which really is there to give the card a more rigid stability, as the size and weight have an adverse effect on it. You can see the GPU reactor here as well, we'll talk about it in a second though.

Hard to see, so we zoom in a little but just under that middle heatpipe you can sport a small BIOS switch. Flick it, boot up and you have activated the overclocking BIOS with much more extreme options. We'll talk about them in our overclocking segment though.

Connectivity you'll receive four connectors, two dual-link DVI connectors supporting all high-resolution monitors and all the way to the left you can see an HDMI (1.4a) connector and one DisplayPort connector. The top part has been kept open for ventilation so that the card can exhaust hot air. Combine it with three monitors for surround monitor gaming or you could opt to go with 3D Vision, bringing an immersive stereoscopic 3D experience to the PC.