Hardware Nvidia GeForce GTX 580 Review

Seriously want one; great sounding card.

 

Well I've had my GTX 580 a week now and I love it; I'm getting that GTX 280 vibe about it and that card, which I owned for 18 months, was *the* best graphics card I'd ever owned up to that point, purely because it gave me the least issues with games.

Every game I've tried on the GTX 580 runs great and plays smoothly despite the fact that I've actually lost some performance going back to a single card from HD 5870 CFX. Not all my games ran with CFX though, and those that did didn't always scale well anyway, so my games feel as fast as before (because I'm v-synced and capped at 60 fps) but more importantly they feel perceptively smoother. Whether that was because of microstuttering or whatever with CFX, I don't know, but I'm happy nevertheless.

The card idles at 30-33 C on the desktop and the maximum I've seen while doing three hours of extensive benchmarking was 82 C. Generally during gaming it doesn't exceed 80 C with 75 C being the average temperature for me, thanks to having great airflow in my case. I haven't heard any noise from my PC either even during heavy load so noise is also a non-issue; in fact it's quieter even than my two HD 5870 Vapor-X cards! The max fan speed I've seen is 60% so overall the cooling and noise levels on this card are exemplary in my view.

It's an expensive card at £385 (I bought my Point of View model from Dabs.com) but it is worth every penny as a good number of my games are close to my previous CFX framerates and some of them, especially those that use DX11, are higher. Unlike CFX, the card can be used for all games too not just the ones that have mutli-GPU support built into the driver.

Highly recommended... if you can afford it.

 

You've made the exact same decision as me as I've off loaded my 2 5870 vapour x's in favour of a Gainward Gtx 580 golden sample. The only difference is my card won't be delivered till the end of the month. In the meantime you've confirmed everything I was banking on, the 5870s were more than enough performance but I couldn't miss the opportunity to get rid of a crossfire set up. It's very disappointing when you've all that grunt but no way to unleash it thanks to underperforming drivers. Nvidia cards do seem to handle dx11 better and that's what sold it for me. I like amd cards but I have had driver issues. The one that really bugged me was that I switch between speakers and a wireless headphone setup regularly which requires me to select one or the other as my default device. The glitch was that when I went to do this I'd click on the sounds icon and it would take over a minute to open. When I uninstall catalyst it would open instantly but once I installed it again it would revert to not opening. I've installed a Gtx 280 while I wait for my Gtx 580 and this issue hasn't happened with nvidia drivers. It really used to do my head in!

 

looks like i'll be picking this up very soon. can't wait to be able to actually play HAWX 2 properly.

with 5870, it shutters and have regular FPS drops.

 

Installed my Gtx 580 last night and tried it out on a number of games. Overall I'm impressed. One Gtx580 represents a slight performance boost for me over my outgoing crossfire setup. BFBC2 has less tearing and IMO just plays smoother with AA maxed and all settings on high. I've tried it in other games I play regularly mafia 2, crysis and dirt 2 and. It's similar story (tho I know these games work well on nvidia). It's nice and quiet too.

 

wow, performance boost over 5870 crossfire! i'd get a great performance boost for single 5870.

can't wait for my one to turn up. but it's in the hands of Citylink........

 

Im sure there are games out there where driver optimised crossfire will outperform it but from last night I had 2-4 extra fps in mafia 2, crysis and dirt 2 benchmarks. More noticeable for me was the smoothness, no micro stutter. In the real world for me the smoothness and not being disappointed by poor scaling is worth it.

I bought the factory overclocked Gainward which might help a tad!

 

Hi im new to all this pc gaming. Could someone please tell me where i can dl a program that tells me my frame rates when im playing my games thank you.

 

Click the links and do a little reading on these:

Fraps

3D Mark11, or look for earlier versions if you have an old GFX card

The FREE versions are limited but useful.

 

Thank you for the info ill look at 3d mark11 cus i have a DX11 card thanks again

 

Free version of fraps as linked to above is good as it allows you to show your fps in the corner of the screen while ur playing. Therefore you get to see the performance of ur card relevant to ur personal usage.

 

No problem, the people here will give you any advice you need, just holla.

Welcome to the forums as well.

 

one more thing whenever i get a new graphics card ill always dl the drivers from nvidia i never use the disk is that ok?.
Does 3d mark also show the fps in the corner of the screen?

 

]one more thing whenever i get a new graphics card ill always dl the drivers from nvidia i never use the disk is that ok?.
Does 3d mark also show the fps in the corner of the screen?.
Thanks for the help and welcome guys.

 

3D Mark will benchmark your PC and give you a score to compare against similar systems. I believe it will display FPS at the same time but I haven't used it for about 2 years so my memory is a little cloudy. It certainly gives you a full run down of results at the end of the benchmark. I generally only use it to compare my own systems so I can see how a new system performs vs my old setups.

 

From what I've used of the basic version 3d mark shows you the frame rate while ur using the 3d mark test suite, it's a self contained program. Fraps runs in the background as long as it's open and minimised on ur task bar and just puts the fps in a corner of the screen while u game. It also allows you to take and save screen shots. Fraps is nice because you have a real time indicator of performance

 

Would it be worth my while upgrading from 2X GTX470's to one of these? I cant stand the sound of both GPU's while gaming and I really dont need sli.