Introduction

NVIDIA recently released their GeForce GTX 580 which claimed the title of fastest single-GPU card in the world. The launch came as a surprise to AMD fans who had been waiting for their HD 6900 Series at that time and were disappointed by what it delivered.
GeForce GTX 580 delivers substantially improved performance over the GTX 480 and also reduces power consumption and acoustic footprint compared to previous generations. Whereas ZOTAC's GeForce GTX 480 AMP! Edition used a powerful Zalman cooler, their new GTX 580 is based on the NVIDIA reference design. The only deviation from NVIDIA specification are the increased clock speeds of 815 MHz, up from 772 MHz of the GeForce GTX 580 reference design.

Packaging

ZOTAC's package comes with a see-through feature that lets you easily inspect the merchandise.

Contents

You will receive:

• Graphics card
• Driver CD + Documentation
• Prince of Persia full game
• DVI adapter
• Mini-HDMI to HDMI adapter
• 2x PCI-Express power cable

The Card

ZOTAC's card looks just like the reference design - the only difference being the sticker on the cooler.


GeForce GTX 580 requires two slots in your system.


The card has two DVI ports and one mini-HDMI port. Unlike AMD's latest GPUs, the output logic design is not as flexible. On AMD cards vendors are free to combine six TMDS links into any output configuration they want (dual-link DVI consuming two links), on NVIDIA, you are fixed to two DVI outputs and one HDMI/DP in addition to that. NVIDIA confirmed that you can use only two displays at the same time, so for a three monitor setup you would need two cards.

NVIDIA has included an HDMI sound device inside their GPU which does away with the requirement of connecting an external audio source to the card for HDMI audio. The HDMI interface is HDMI 1.3a compatible which includes Dolby TrueHD, DTS-HD, AC-3, DTS and up to 7.1 channel audio with 192 kHz / 24-bit. NVIDIA also claims full support for the 3D portion of the HDMI 1.4 specification which will become important later this year when we will see first Blu-Ray titles shipping with support for 3D output.


You may combine up to four GeForce GTX 580 cards in SLI for increased performance or improved image quality settings.


Here are the front and the back of the card, high-res versions are also available (front, back). If you choose to use these images for voltmods etc, please include a link back to this site or let us post your article.