Detailed Features and Pictures
The Box and Packaging
The GFX card itself
The most obvious difference between a reference card and this GTX580 SOC is the heatsink. It’s not subtle. The reference cards have a vapor chamber (rather than heatpipes) based heatsink that stomps every heatpipe heatsink that came before it, unfortunately they still use a squirrel cage fan to push air through it, and while it keeps the card nice and cool it also makes a substantial amount of noise.
This card however does one better, it uses a larger vapor chamber heatsink AND two 8mm heatpipes combined to distribute the heat to an absolutely huge heatsink. That in turn has three normal style fans bolted to it. The vapor chamber touches the core as well as all the ram, and then there is a separate heatsink for the mosfets that deliver core and memory voltage. It looks very well designed, we’ll see how it fares in the testing section.
The other big change is in the power delivery, rather than five phases for the core and two (undersized) phases for the memory, the GTX580 SOC uses no fewer than twelve phases, and nice juicy ones at that! Each phase gets a little LED on the back of the card so you know it’s working, too.
The only down side in this section is the row of mosfets on the back of the card without active cooling.
Beyond even that, there are five HUGE capacitors on the back of the card to smooth the voltage out, this is a spectacularly overkill power section, no doubt about it. I love it!
A Closer Look
You still get the standard two DVI plugs and one mini-HDMI on the output plate, nothing new there.
Lastly, there is a little button to switch between two BIOSes, this means you can put two different bioses (say one for hardcore overclocking, and another for low power energy saving mode) on the card, and switch between them at will. Alternatively you can use the second bios as a backup in case the first has issues. Either way, this is a very nice feature!
Ok, lets do some testing and see how far this card performs, how it overclocks, how hot it gets while doing it and how much noise the fans make!
