today we're going to be unboxing a very very exciting product this is the EVGA
GeForce GTX 580 that is 100 more than
the 480 it's actually not 100 more because it's difficult to quantify a
graphics card in terms of a numerical
value other than well I guess FPS but
there's features too so bear that in mind so let's get this guy out of his
packaging and have a look so this is the latest and greatest from NVIDIA this is
actually the replacement for the relatively short-lived GTX 480 and I
guess you could say it's more of an evolutionary change than a revolutionary
change because we do have still a very
similar feature set so we've got support for 2-way SLI 3-way SLI direct X11 fizx
3D Vision surround we have 1.5 gigs of
Graphics memory so stop me if any of that sounds amiliar but one of the big
improvements that we're making with this card over the GTX 480 is the fact that
we've improved the power consumption okay so that is less power consumption
we've improved the heat output that is less heat output and we've also improved
the performance so that is more performance so it's what the gtx480 is
except better better and better in every
way so here is an overall key feature list two-way three-way and pardon me
four-way SLI is also supported on select
motherboards we've got full support for NVIDIA's Cuda initiative that is using
your graphics card to do complex computational equations such as folding
at home or video rendering all right here we have a little note about
connecting your GTX 580 to the power supply next we have a graphics card user
guide okay which is U probably feels
very short as well as a quick start guide all right there we go shows you
how to plug in your power shows you where the SLI connector is well we don't need to look at this because we have a
real card to look at next we've got an EVGA driver SLS software installation
disc as well as a powered by EVGA sticker so throw that away download the
latest off the NVIDIA website you've heard me say that before and let's have
a look at the accessories that are included with this card so first of all
we have a dual Molex to six pin PCI Express connector next we have a dual
six pin PCI Express connector to PCI Express 8 pin connector finally we have
a mini HDMI to HDMI connector and then
we have a DVI to VGA connector so with
all of the adapters that are included you could theoretically be running this
off some ancient power supply that doesn't have proper support for it on
some ancient VGA monitor that probably doesn't deserve such a great graphics
card powering it but I'm sure most of you are going to be running this with
with the recommended power supply which actually whoops oh cool hey we found
something else inside here I'm sorry here let's check this out so it looks
like this card actually comes with an EVGA poster check that out EVGA gaming
want that on your W look at that evj gaming.com I can't
actually quite tell what this is a picture of but it's it's a skull and
then there appears to be like some car parts attached to it oh it's some kind
of like r thing with a skull on the top of it either way that's pretty cool so
you get a poster with your video card here you know all right we'll put that
away actually here why don't we do why don't we do a quick contest around this poster so I want you guys to um let me
see I'll come up with something arbitrary like I want you to tell me
what you would name that skeleton guy and whatever name I like the best I will
send you the poster done all right so
let's uh actually right I wanted to check out the uh minimum system requ
requirements in terms of power supply so here so EVGA is recommending a 600 watt
or greater power supply with a minimum of 42 amps on the 12vt rail okay and
other than that it's all fairly fairly standard stuff and let's just have a
look at um what else we had on here oh
right yeah EVGA does some bragging on the outside of this box which I also
wanted to talk about and so they should
number one seller of NVIDIA based products in the US number one
reliability and service and that is in a survey that was conducted in 2010 number
one performance leader in 3D Mark Vantage as well as the number one
folding at home team in the world those are certainly some points that are worth
bragging about so now let's have a look at the GTX 580 itself this isn't a
reference card so that means that EVGA has customized the look and feel of the
card itself and probably not much else
although EVGA does have many custom cards that they do where they use
different coolers or they actually overclock the stock frequency of the
card past what NVIDIA specification is and they'll give you a lifetime warranty
on that as well that's one of the other really cool things about EVGA is their
lifetime warranty so let's do a quick tour of the card first of all we've got
our fan here so that fan spins blows the air out the back of your case this is a
rear exhaust design on this card so that means that you're not going to have to
worry about the heat being expelled into your case and then having to use hot air
to cool the card itself although we are going to lose a little little bit of it out the top here that's probably to
decrease the Restriction of the cooling mechanism so that we can yeah we can
exhaust some out here if we absolutely have to and same goes down at the bottom
we have a standard sorry about that guys battery died so standard PCI Express 2.0
16x slot let's move around let's see if there's anything else interesting on the
bottom of the card it doesn't really look like it so let's move around to the
back of the card so here you can see the GF 110 that is the code name of the GPU
that powers the GTX 580 so that's where it's mounted on the PCB you can see the
power delivery system is all over on this side you can also see where the
memory modules are mounted around the outside of the GPU so that you got nice
short PCB traces so it communicate can communicate very quickly with that
memory here is the two SLI connectors that are required for two-way you only
need one three-way as well as four-way
SLI and last but not least let's have a look at the top of the card where we
have our PCI Express pin as well as our PCI Express 8 Pin power connectors and
then let's move around to the back where finally we have two DVI outputs as well
as that one mini HDMI which EVGA kindly
provides a mini HDMI to standard HDMI output so that you can make proper use
of it so thank you for checking out my unboxing of the GTX 580 don't forget to
check out my other launch day coverage of this exciting new GPU from envidia
and don't forget to subscribe to Linus Tech tips