NVIDIA GeForce GTX 580 Video Card Review

The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 580 (Cont’d)

In Figure 4, you can see the video card with its cooler removed. Note how it requires one six- and one eight-pin auxiliary power connectors. In Figures 5 and 6, you can see the cooler by itself. It has a copper base using vapor chamber technology, which is the same technology behind heat-pipes.

Figure 4: Video card with the cooler removed

Figure 5: The GPU cooler

Figure 6: The GPU cooler

The reviewed card uses 12 1 Gbit GDDR5 chips, making its 1.5 GB video memory (1 Gbit x 12 = 1.5 GB). Each chip is connected to the GPU using a 32-bit data lane, making the video card’s 384-bit memory interface (32 bits x 12 = 384).

The chips used are K4G10325FE-HC04 parts from Samsung, which support up to 1.25 GHz (4.5 GHz QDR) and since on this video card memory is accessed at 1 GHz (4 GHz QDR), there is a nice 12.5% margin for you to increase the memory clock rate while keeping the chips inside the maximum they support. Of course you can always try to overclock the memory chips above their specs.

Figure 7: Memory chips

Before seeing the performance results, let’s recap the main features of this video card.