NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 580: Fermi Refined

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• chizow - Tuesday, November 9, 2010 - link

  There's 2 ways they can go with the GTX 570, either more disabled SM than just 1 (2-3) and similar clockspeed to the GTX 580, or fewer disabled SM but much lower clockspeed. Both would help to reduce TDP but with more disabled SM that would also help Nvidia unload the rest of their chip yield. I have a feeling they'll disable 2-3 SM with higher clocks similar to the 580 so that the 470 is still slightly slower than the 480.
  
  I'm thinking along the same lines as you though for the GTX 560, it'll most likely be the full-fledged GF104 we've been waiting for with all 384SP enabled, probably slightly higher clockspeeds and not much more than that, but definitely a faster card than the original GF104.

• vectorm12 - Tuesday, November 9, 2010 - link

  I'd really love to see the raw crunching power of the 480/580 vs. 5870/6870.
  
  I've found ighashgpu to be a great too to determine that and it can be found at http://www.golubev.com/
  
  Please consider it for future tests as it's very well optimized for both CUDA and Stream

• spigzone - Tuesday, November 9, 2010 - link

  The performance advantage of a single GPU vs CF or SLI is steadily diminishing and approaching a point of near irrelevancy.
  
  6870 CF beats out the 580 in nearly every parameter, often substantially on performance benchmarks, and per current newegg prices, comes in at $80 cheaper.
  
  But I think the real sweet spot would be a 6850 CF setup with AMD Overdrive applied 850Mz clocks, which any 6850 can achieve at stock voltages with minimal thermal/power/noise costs (and minimal 'tinkering'), and from the few 6850 CF benchmarks that showed up would match or even beat the GTX580 on most game benchmarks and come in at $200 CHEAPER.
  
  That's an elbow from the sky in my book.

• smookyolo - Tuesday, November 9, 2010 - link

  You seem to be forgetting the minimum framerates... those are so much more important than average/maximum.

• Sihastru - Tuesday, November 9, 2010 - link

  Agreed, CF scales very badly when it comes to minumum framerates. It is even below the minimum framerates of one of the cards in the CF setup. It is very anoying when you're doing 120FPS in a game and from time to time your framerates drop to an unplayable and very noticable 20FPS.

• chizow - Tuesday, November 9, 2010 - link

  Nice job on the review as usual Ryan,
  
  Would've liked to have seen some expanded results however, but somewhat understandable given your limited access to hardware atm. It sounds like you plan on having some SLI results soon.
  
  I would've really liked to have seen clock-for-clock comparisons though to the original GTX 480 though to isolate the impact of the refinements between GF100 and GF110. To be honest, taking away the ~10% difference in clockspeeds, what we're left with seems to be ~6-10% from those missing 6% functional units (32 SM and 4 TMUs).
  
  I would've also liked to have seen some preliminary overclocking results with the GF110 to see how much the chip revision and cooling refinements increased clockspeed overhead, if at all. Contrary to somewhat popular belief, the GTX 480 did overclock quite well, and while that also increased heat and noise it'll be hard for someone with an overclocked 480 to trade it in for a 580 if it doesn't clock much better than the 480.
  
  I know you typically have follow-up articles once the board partners send you more samples, so hopefully you consider these aspects in your next review, thanks!
  
  PS: On page 4, I believe this should be a supposed GTX 570 mentioned in this excerpt and not GTX 470: "At 244W TDP the card draws too much for 6+6, but you can count on an eventual GTX 470 to fill that niche."

• mapesdhs - Tuesday, November 9, 2010 - link

  
  "I would've also liked to have seen some preliminary overclocking results ..."
  
  Though obviously not a true oc'ing revelation, I note with interest there's already
  a factory oc'd 580 listed on seller sites (Palit Sonic), with an 835 core and 1670
  shader. The pricing is peculiar though, with one site pricing it the same as most
  reference cards, another site pricing it 30 UKP higher. Of course though, none
  of them show it as being in stock yet. :D
  
  Anyway, thanks for the writeup! At least the competition for the consumer finally
  looks to be entering a more sensible phase, though it's a shame the naming
  schemes are probably going to fool some buyers.
  
  Ian.

• Ryan Smith - Wednesday, November 10, 2010 - link

  You're going to have to wait until I have some more cards for some meaningful overclocking results. However clock-for-clock comparisons I can do.
  
  http://www.anandtech.com/show/4012/nvidias-geforce...

• JimmiG - Tuesday, November 9, 2010 - link

  Well technically, this is not a 512-SP card at 772 MHz. This is because if you ever find a way to put all 512 processors at 100% load, the throttling mechanism will kick in.
  
  That's like saying you managed to overclock your CPU to 4.7 GHz.. sure, it might POST, but as soon as you try to *do* anything, it instantly crashes.

• Ryan Smith - Tuesday, November 9, 2010 - link

  Based on the performance of a number of games and compute applications, I am confident that power throttling is not kicking in for anything besides FurMark and OCCT.