this will be a quick overview of the testing setup that I'll be using for my
GTX 580 review so as you can see here I
do have two GeForce GTX 580s I have one
from MSI and then I also have one from
EVGA so that means that I will be including SLI testing for the GTX 580 as
well as crossfire testing for the radon
5870 which as of right now is the
closest competitor for the GTX 580 although I don't expect that to be the
case for uh for very much longer in the future now one of the other comparisons
I also want to make just to include it in my charts is the GTX 480 which the
580 is replacing and just because it
represents such a good value I also have
two MSI GeForce GTX 460 Hawk edition
cards because two 460s when they came out on the market with the exceptional
scaling that you get in crossfire as well as with the outstanding
overclocking of the hawk Edition card became a great value for a performance
Enthusiast because two 460s was actually
cheaper than a 480 but provided better performance so I really want to see
where the GTX 580 Falls in relation to
two overclocked 460s which are out there on the market for a very good price
these days now I want to introduce you to the test bench really quick I have my
3.8 GHz core i7
875k I have that running with 4 gigs of
Kingston hyperx RAM I've got an ASUS
Crossfire and SLI ready motherboard down there somewhere so I've got a new CPU
Cooler now actually it keeps my uh chip
quite a bit cooler than the A50 I was using before this is a silent X aphysio
extreme now down here I have a cougar SX
series 850 W power supply which is more than capable of power in all the cards
down here below mind you not all at the same time that would be quite
unreasonable and then for my boot drive I'm using an Intel x25 M 80 gig drive
now I have changed my monitor setup slightly as you may or may not be able
to tell that is a 30in monitor so I'm going to be doing all of my benchmarks
other than 3D Mark at 2560 x600 3D Mark
is going to be run in the extreme profile because the reality of it is the
gpus I'm testing here today are all
premium high-end products so we're going to use them as they're intended to be
used and that is at extremely high resolution and find out how they all
compare to each other stay tuned for
more now for Starcraft 2 it's pretty obvious that with every setup from the
GTX 480 up through the 460s and SLI and
the 580 580s in SLI we got almost exactly the same frame rate so what that
comes down to is a CPU bottleneck it means that this game cannot take
advantage of the extra GPU power that we're throwing at it now I was not
running Starcraft 2 with anti-aliasing and if we turned on anti-aliasing we'd
probably see some improvement however with that unit count bear in mind we
were using a very action intensive part of the game to do our benchmarking we
were not able to find any difference between well one very high-end solution
and another even more Uber high-end
solution Mafia 2 is being tested with physx so we have not included any
results for Radeon cards they didn't fail the test they just can't run it
with
fizx for Metro 2033 with fizx you
probably noticed the GTX 460 SLI config is not in there and that's because it
failed the reason is that the GTX 460
only has 1 gig of video memory and what
that means is because the two cards in SLI can't share that video memory you
have effectively one gig of video memory and at that resolution with those
settings with that particular game you
need more RAM so that's what the GTX 480
and the GTX 580 had as an advantage over
those lower-end cards so that's why I wasn't able to include any 460 SLI
results
I did another run through of Metro 2033 with no physx so that I could include
the radon cards and as you can see the GTX 460 SLI config still didn't make it
I got a benchmark result and it kind of fell in line with everything else but I
can't present that to you guys because when I was playing through the game it
did not feel right like I had times where it dipped down and it felt like 2
FPS even though at the end The Benchmark reported something like very very
playable so uh that's why I could not include that result
there Battlefield Bad Company 2 is actually one of the games that uh scaled
extremely well with all of the different cards that we ran and we were able to
generate very consistent results I did a little playthrough of the uh in between
going through the town here and then where at the end you find a tank uh
that's the part of this game that was used for the uh benchmarking
purposes and uh try and take out the out at the rocket launcher now you can't get
a consistent run through every time so I did have to do multiple run throughs
with each GPU and average them amount but I think overall we get a result
that's fairly representative of what each graphics card is capable of in this
particular shooter
game going to be completely honest with you guys I didn't have a whole lot of
time to spend with the GTX 580s my radon
5870 Crossfire setup was doing some
weird stuff in crisis where I was getting worse performance than a single
card at 2560 x600 I didn't even have the
time to really look up and find out if that's a common issue cuz there aren't
too many people who are trying to run crisis with anti-aliasing at 2560 x600
with radon 5870 Crossfire so it's uh
probably not all that well documented but basically sorry I couldn't include
those results you can check out everything else though
for power consumption bear in mind all of my measurements are taken from the
wall and they are an absolute Peak value so you can expect that usually while
gaming it'll be quite a bit lower but this is the maximum power consumption
that I was able to pull from the wall with this system during the entire
benchmarking process for each GPU so that means that if I was doing something
CPU intensive at the same time as gaming it could probably be higher so make sure
that when you're budgeting a PS you for your build if you're going to use one of
these new cards like say for example the GTX 580 that you plan
accordingly so here's the settings that uh we ran Metro 2033 on although
actually as you saw from my introduction when I was at home and I was not at work
I had a 30-in monitor at my disposal so the benchmarks were done remember at two
different resolutions for Metro 23 2560
x600 as well as 1920 x 1200 although
these are the other settings that are being used everything is enabled so
we're going to do some quick gaml here while I just talk a little bit about the
GTX 580 and what this particular game
means to the market so this is the run through that I did in order to test
Metro 2033 it's on the level the bridge
and I follow this guy around kill some dudes basically I've got the GTX 580
setup running right now and I'm just wanting to show
you how beefy this setup is it really
does blow away everything else especially in the 2560 x600 resolution
because so many of the other setups that I tried to run this game at those
settings with just outright failed they
just couldn't do it and here you can see it's butter smooth even at 1920 x 1200
everything maxed out I'm seeing you know 50 frames per second hold on I better
put on my gas mask in just a second you guys will have some combat to check out
and so uh that's one of the things I really
noticed about the Lesser setups is that especially when the action gets a little
bit more intense the frame rate dips and it can even sort of skip a couple and
that's where it becomes unplayable very very quickly so I got a monster rushing
at me can kill the guy stays very smooth
no matter what I'm doing shotgun 40 FPS still anyway so all of
that aside GTX 580 what does it mean well it's really really expensive so not
everyone can afford one it's going to be up over $500 Canadian at launch however
unlike its predecessor the 480 NVIDIA has really gotten a few
things under control they've completely fixed the problem with the excess heat
output for the power compared to the competition that's on the market today
they fixed the problem with the noise both by using their Innovative Vapor
chamber cooler as well as their adaptive fan profile so make sure you do check
out my videos that are dedicated to those two aspects of this card I show
how the fan ramps up and down very slowly so it sounds very smooth and I
also disassemble the MSI card so you can see the vapor chamber cooler up close
and personal and they've added more power and it comes in at the same price
as a GTX 580 so it's really hard to uh
to find anything wrong with it I guess it's a super premium product like I said
so it's quite expensive but it's pretty
much a gamech Cher and it is without a doubt whether it's a loan or an SLI the
fastest graphics card solution that you can buy today so thank you for checking
out my performance review of the GTX 580 don't forget to check out a lot of the
other videos that I've done around this important launch for NVIDIA and thanks
for checking out lineus Tech tips don't forget to subscribe