Introduction

NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 580 came as a surprise to many, who didn't expect NVIDIA could pull off another high-end GPU release in 2010. The new card delivers significantly improved performance over the GTX 480, while keeping power consumption in check and emitting reduced noise levels.

MSI taken this successful base design and customized it on their GTX 580 Lightning. "Lightning" series has been MSI's flagship series of high-end graphics cards geared toward overclockers and enthusiasts who are not afraid of using more exotic cooling foms like liquid nitrogen or dry ice. The card sports many features for that crowd, like triple voltage control, voltage measuring points, DIP switches and a dual BIOS feature. Thanks to MSI's excellent Afterburner overclocking software, which fully supports the card, software based overclocking is also a breeze.

In terms of pricing, MSI asks a $20 price increase which at first look, seems justified considering the considerable overclock out of the box.

Packaging

Contents

You will receive:

• Graphics card
• Driver CD + Documentation
• 2x PCI-Express Power Cable
• DVI to Analog VGA Adapter
• 2x Long SLI Bridge
• 3x Voltage Measurement Cable

The Card

MSI's GeForce GTX 580 Lightning uses an upscaled version of the Twin Frozr III cooler that we have seen on other MSI cards before. Unlike the smaller version of the cooler, this one does not extend far beyond the back edge of the card which will help getting it fitted into smaller cases.


The card requires two slots in your system.


The card has two DVI ports, one full size HDMI port and one full size DisplayPort. 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 GTX 580 cards from any vendor in SLI.


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.