Last month, Gainward introduced its GeForce GTX 570 Phantom, which won quite some appreciation among readers for its radical design. The company decided to extend it to the GeForce GTX 580, too, since it's based on the same GF110 silicon. The only major change is that 2 Gbit memory chips are used, yielding a total memory of 3072 MB (3 GB). The memory is spread across 12 2 Gbit memory chips across a 384-bit wide GDDR5 memory interface. Clock speeds stick to NVIDIA reference: 783/1566/4020 MHz (core/CUDA cores/memory effective). The GTX 580 packs 512 CUDA cores.

The cooler makes use of a black aluminum fin array, to which heat is fed by six heat pipes. Instead of fans on its obverse side blowing air onto the PCB, there are three fans on its reverse side, drawing air from the aluminum fin array, and onto the PCB. The result is a better-looking product. Display outputs include two DVI, and one each of HDMI and DisplayPort. Gainward will release its 3 GB GTX 580 Phantom graphics card soon, at a premium over the reference design.