ASUS’ latest graphics card, the ENGTX580/2DI/1536MD5 (to give this monster its full name), is a GeForce GTX 580 built using Nvidia’s revamped GF110 graphics processor, that launched this week. It’s packing more frames than a poster factory, as this card has been widely benchmarked and unanimously heralded as the fastest single GPU product on the market.
The brand new Nvidia GF110 core is an update of the GF100, where Nvidia has worked with TSMC (who makes the actual silicon hardware) to hit the holy grail of both lowering the power consumption while simultaneously increasing clock speeds and unlocking the last of the ‘Streaming Multiprocessor’ clusters, to give it a massive 512 ‘cores’.
The ENGTX580 clock speeds boast a 782 MHz core clock with the shader clocks doubling this at 1,564MHz. The memory bandwidth has been increased to a whopping 192.4GB/second with its 1.5GB of GDDR5 clocked at 4GHz (effective) on a 384-bit interface. The improvements over the GeForce GTX 480 are in all areas: core, shader and memory clocks – which are originally 700MHz, 1,400MHz and 3.6GHz respectively.
So, all the technical stuff aside, the bottom line is that it’s faster, cooler and lower power than even the fastest Nvidia card previous. That’s win-win, and win!
The ENGTX580 might use the reference design and new vapour chamber cooler, but inside the card still gets ASUS’ famous Voltage Tweak software that allows precise, extra voltage for a bigger boost in overclocking. Providing you can keep it cool, ASUS claims there’s up to a 50% performance boost to be had using it!
As usual there’s also Nvidia’s Stereoscopic 3D and PhysX support out the box, and given the extra grunt this card can handle the extreme high-definition of a 30 inch display (2,560 x 1,600) and strap two together in SLI (maybe using other powerful gaming hardware, like a Maximus III Extreme or Rampage III Extreme?) and this will support Stereoscopic 3D over three monitors, creating a more immersive and wrap-around gaming experience.
If you demand your games be in High-Definition and with all the graphical wizardry maxed out – the ENGTX580 certainly has to be a list topping choice.