Palit NVIDIA GeForce GTX 580 3GB Dual Fan Video Card Unboxing & First Look Linus Tech Tips
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2011-05-08
·
1,485 words · ~7 min read
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so guys I've been informed I should keep it down on account of Esther shooting
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some kind of Fail video in the room next to me you should subscribe to her
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Channel if you want to see her videos it's NC Esther so today I'm going to be
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unboxing the palette gForce GTX 580 now
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this isn't like your your dad's or your grandpa's GTX 580 this is a somewhat
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different GTX 580 first of all it has a dual fan
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cooler second of all it has a DisplayPort output and third of all it has
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three gigs yes three gigs of memory on a
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single single GPU card so it supports
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directx11 3D Vision surround fiz X Cuda SLI supports NVIDIA surround without 3D
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Vision as well but you'll need two cards for that and this is actually one of the
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few situations where I would really recommend a card like this with 3 gigs
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of memory and I'll get into that a little bit more why uh later so here are
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some logos for all of that stuff that I mentioned before it's compatible with
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Windows 7 it bloody well better be if it's a direct X11 ready supposedly okay
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there's some kind of sticker there there's the pallette Frog okay there's more branding some more branding no more
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frogs yeah we got another frog on the back there's their frog guy yeah yeah
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okay what else we got so technical specifications NVIDIA GeForce chipset
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open G DirectX okay built for DirectX 11
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surround gaming yeah more on that later play in 3D 3D is good it is a PCI
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Express 2.0 16x card which we will see when we
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open it up and it requires a minimum 600 watt or greater power supply with at
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least 12 um rather at least 42 amps on
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the 12vt rail remember that's a combined 42 amps
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if you have dual 12vt rails and you have one that's like you know 30 and another
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that's 30 that's still good enough to be 42
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amps all right inside the Box we will
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find some stuff mostly we will find foam
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no video cards sorry not today I'm just kidding there's a video card in here
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okay so there's the GTX 580 uh but I'm just kidding I'm going to
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show you guys the accessories first so there is a dual six pin to8 pin PCIe
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adapter how exciting that's it in there next we have
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a DVI to VGA adapter you're seriously still running a VGA Monitor and a like
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this and yes I stand by what I said a lot of people are complaining about that
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particular comment but I think it's true I think if you're buying a $500 graphics
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card you ought to upgrade your monitor if you're still actually running a VGA
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monitor here's a quick installation guide here's a driver disc don't use it
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download the latest from the NVIDIA website and finally here is the card
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itself so we're going to pull this guy
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out
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ever say ever so carefully and I think I'm I think I'm
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already going to like this card yes yes I am already going to like
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this card because it has a matte black
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PCB awesome I'm a big fan of the matte
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black PCB see Zero reflection nothing
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just matte black awesomeness everything looks good when it's in silver and matte
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black see here's a standard GTX 580 PCB
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for contrast see how shiny that is see
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how shiny this is not at all all right
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so here is our standard PCI Express 16x
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connector here's our dual SLI fingers so
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this car does support up to two-way and
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three-way and even four-way SLI on supported motherboards although four-way
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SLI isn't a great value I mean neither is three-way but four-way really isn't a
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Great Value three-way is probably about as high as I would go even for an
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extreme gaming rig here on the back of the card we find that non-standard
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output setup that I talked about so we've got dual DVI fulls sizee HDMI and
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DisplayPort so we'll contrast that with the standard GTX 580 where we find dual
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DVI and mini HDMI so that's a little bit
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different we also do not have a full PCI
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bracket width for for exhaust and the reason for that is we are using a
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non-reference cooler so right here we're using kind of a uh a dual fan these look
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like oh it's hard to say I think they're probably 80 Ms but they might be 70 Ms I
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can't quite tell they're lowprofile fans this is still a dual slot card so you
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don't need three slots for the card itself although I would still recommend
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leaving the next slot over vacant so that these fans do have some room to
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breathe most of the exhaust it looks like due to the shape of the cooler is
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being down out the back of the card here where you can see it's just full of
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dense dense fins that's a very dense aluminum fin cooler there's your two
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fans plugged in so this is a fully custom PCB not just the color but the
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entire PCB design CU it has actual fan inputs for both of these fans rather
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than just one and then obviously here on the other
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side so you can see the the fins through there but that one's not going to be
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able to exhaust as much should be okay it's only a single GPU card so it's not
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like we have to about two gpus getting equal cooling or anything like that so I
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would expect it to perform at least as well as the stock cooler if not it
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should actually be better I mean look at this you got how many fat heat pipes is
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that on there looks like you got about four heat pipes in there uh carrying
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heat over here to the other side as well as uh over to the front of the card up
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here on the top looks fairly standard so
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like I said you got your SLI fingers you've also got a four pin and a three
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pin connector so just because it has more memory doesn't mean that it needs
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more power it uses the same amount of power as a standard GTX 580 so that's
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pretty much everything I wanted to say about this card except why you would buy
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one so a 3 gig GTX 580 what is it for
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well it's for SLI running triple monitor
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HD Plus resolution configurations or if
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you play with like ridiculous High texture highres texture packs in your
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favorite games because the reality of it is 1.5 gigs is plenty of RAM for a GTX
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580 unless you're running an extreme usage scenario so remember in SLI doing
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like let's say you're doing NVIDIA surround with 3 2560 x600 monitors each
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card has to store all of the textures has to use its own frame buffer to store
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all of the information necessary for that entire like six times HD resolution
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that you're talking about with a setup like that I think it what is it
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something like 12 megapixels so when
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you're in SLI you don't actually get to double your frame when you put two cards
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together so you run two of these you don't have three gigs of memory
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effectively you actually only have 1.5 still so if you run two of these or
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three of these you only have three gigs of effective memory no matter how many
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cards you're running together so that is why if you are running a great big
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resolution or if you're running
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um yeah mostly just big resolutions
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something like this could be really handy because it could be the difference like you don't just get a linear
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performance increase from more memory it would be the difference between it's
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playable at you know like 40 FPS or it runs at
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like 6 FPS because it's completely out of memory and it has to swap so it has
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to swap to the drive so there you go thank you for checking out my unboxing
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of the pallet GTX 583 gig don't forget to subscribe to lus Tech tips for more
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