Testing and Results
I selected three benchmarks for testing this card, 3dMark11, 3dMark Vantage, and Lost Planet 2 DX-11.
3dMark11
3dMark11 is the newest of Futuremark’s 3d benchmarks, it has three brutally intense DX11 GPU tests, two gnarly CPU tests, and a downright vicious CPU+GPU DX11 test. This makes it an excellent indication of GPU and GPU/CPU performance for gaming.
See that? Crushing performance is what that is. It’s right up at the front of the pack for GTX580s and flat destroys everything else. And this GTX580SOC is cruising along with it’s stock clocks and low voltage too. Gotta love that.
3dMark Vantage
3dMark Vantage is Futuremark’s next benchmark back from 3dMark11, the major difference is that Vantage uses DirectX 10 rather then DirectX11. This makes it a good test for gaming performance in older games.
25.7k in Vantage with a single card was nearly unobtainable before the GTX580 showed up, and now it is still right at the top of the pile for single card performance, very few cards will beat this GTX580SOC in vantage at stock clock speeds!
Lost Planet 2
I would be neglecting my readers if I didn’t put an actual game in this review, so I scared up the Lost Planet 2 benchmark. It is a DX11 game with rather nice visuals, and is a fairly serious load on the GPU. The benchmark runs through three scenes and averages the frame rate for the final score. Unfortunately due to my monitor situation I had to run it at 1280×1024, but I was able to crank the AntiAliasing up to 32x. That means every single frame has to be rendered 33 times, which is flat out brutal.
The only issue with Lost Planet 2 is that it doesn’t allow taking a screenshot of the benchmark results. The results for test A were 112.2fps, more than almost any monitor can actually display. Excellent!
I also played with overclocking a bit in LP2, and found that a core speed of 918MHz was easily obtainable, and when paired with a quick and easy memory overclock to 1075MHz (up from 1025MHz) resulted in a score of 116.5fps. Excellent scaling with overclocking here!
Overclocking
For overclocking Gigabyte provides some “OC Guru” software that allows you to adjust the core and memory clock speeds, as well as memory and core voltage. Having control over memory voltage is very rare, this is a nice perk from Gigabyte!
With the nice safe vcore limitation of 1.15v left intact, it cruised through Lost Planet 2 at 918/1075MHz That’s quite a bit faster than the stock for this card, which is in turn quite a bit faster than the reference cards. 918 core at 1.15v is unreal for a gtx580, Gigabyte clearly does a good job with their GPU Gauntlet sorting process.
The best part? While throwing down those clock speeds the fans never went higher than 61% of full speed, and I could barely hear them! The maximum temperature recorded was a minuscule 65c. That is absolutely nothing considering that the GTX580 cores are built to run as high as 100c-105c. Even with the fans set to 100% full blast they don’t make much noise, far, far less than the reference cards.
Gigabyte did an good job with the heatsink/fan combination on the GTX580 Super OverClock, though a heatsink on the mosfets on the back of the card would be nice.
One thing that is important to consider is that the hot air from the card is not expelled out the rear of the case, that means that you will need to have some decent case airflow to remove the hot air. I don’t rate this is an issue because if you’re buying a GTX580 you should be buying a good case to go with it anyway.
