The Test
For our look at the GTX 580 we will only be looking at single card performance. As a measure of promotion for their OEM partners, NVIDIA would only make a second GTX 580 available to us if we also agreed to review a high-end gaming system. Because the high-end system was completely unnecessary for a GPU review we declined NVIDIA’s offer, and as a result we were only offered 1 GTX 580 which you’ll be seeing here today. We will be looking at SLI performance once we can acquire a second GTX 580 farther down the line.
For our testing we’ll be using the latest version of our GPU benchmark suite, which was introduced back in our Radeon HD 6800 series review two weeks ago. We’re using the latest drivers from both AMD and NVIDIA here – Catalyst Hotfix 10.10d for AMD, and Forceware 262.99 for the NVIDIA cards.
Finally, as we mentioned earlier, AMD doesn’t have a direct competitor to the GTX 580. The closest competitors they have are dual-GPU setups in the form of the closeout 5970 and the 6870 in Crossfire. Meanwhile NVIDIA has cut GTX 470 prices so far to the bone that you can pick up a pair of them for as much as a single GTX 580. Two slightly crippled GF100 cards versus one GF110 card will not be a fair fight…
| CPU: | Intel Core i7-920 @ 3.33GHz |
| Motherboard: | Asus Rampage II Extreme |
| Chipset Drivers: | Intel 9.1.1.1015 (Intel) |
| Hard Disk: | OCZ Summit (120GB) |
| Memory: | Patriot Viper DDR3-1333 3 x 2GB (7-7-7-20) |
| Video Cards: | AMD Radeon HD 6870 AMD Radeon HD 6850 AMD Radeon HD 5970 AMD Radeon HD 5870 AMD Radeon HD 5850 AMD Radeon HD 5770 AMD Radeon HD 4870 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 580 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 480 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 470 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 460 1GB NVIDIA GeForce GTX 460 768MB NVIDIA GeForce GTX 285 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 260 Core 216 |
| Video Drivers: | NVIDIA ForceWare 262.99 AMD Catalyst 10.10d |
| OS: | Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit |
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