Gadgetory

today we're going to be unboxing a very very exciting product this is the EVGA GeForce GTX 580 that is 100 more than the 480 it's actually not a hundred more because it's difficult to quantify a graphics part in terms of a numerical value other than well I guess FPS but there's features to bear that in mind so let's get this guy out of his packaging and have a look so this is the latest and greatest from Nvidia this is actually the replacement for the relatively short-lived GTX 480 and I guess you could say it's more of an evolutionary change than a revolutionary change because we do have still a very similar feature set so we've got support for two-way SLI 3-way SLI DirectX 11 physics 3d vision surround we have 1.5 gigs of graphics memory so stop me if any of that sounds familiar but one of the big improvements that were making with this card over the GTX 480 is the fact that we've improved the power consumption okay so that is less power consumption we've improved the heat output that is less heat output and we've also improved the performance so that is more performance so it's what the GTX 480 is except better better and better in every way so here is an overall key feature list 2-way 3-way and fired pardon me 4 Way SLI is also supported on select motherboards we've got full support for NVIDIA --zz CUDA initiative that is using your graphics card to do complex computational equations such as folding at home or video rendering alright here we have a little note about connecting your GTX 580 to the power supply next we have a graphics card user guide ok probably this feels very short as well as a QuickStart guide all right there we go shows you how to plug in your power shows you where the SLI connector is well we don't need to look at this because we have a real card to look at next we've got an EVGA driver slash software installation disk as well as a powered by EVGA sticker so throw that away download latest off the Nvidia website you've heard me say that before and let's have a look at the accessories that are included with this card so first of all we have a dual molex to 6-pin PCI Express connector next we have a dual 6 pin PCI Express connector to PCI Express 8 pin connector finally we have a mini HDMI to HDMI connector and then we have a DVI to VGA connector so with all of the adapters that are included you could theoretically be running this off some ancient power supply that doesn't have proper support for it on some ancient VGA monitor that probably doesn't deserve such a great graphics card powering it but I'm sure most of you are gonna be running this with the recommended power supply which actually whoops oh I'm sorry here let's check this out so it looks like this card actually comes with an EVGA poster check that out EVGA gaming whoa look at that VGA gaming comm I can't actually quite tell that this is a picture of but it's a skull and then there appears to be like some car parts attached to it oh it's some kind of like robotic thing with a skull on the top of it either way that's pretty cool so you get a poster with your video card you know alright no put that away actually here why don't we do why don't we do a quick contest around this poster so I want you guys to let me see I'll come up with something arbitrary like I want you to tell me what you would name that skeleton guy and whatever name I like the best I will send you the poster done alright so that's actually right I wanted to check out the minimum system requirements in terms of power supply so here so EVGA is recommending a 600 watt or greater power supply with a minimum of 42 amps on the 12 volt rail okay and other than that it's all fairly fairly standard stuff and let's just have a look at what else we had on here oh right yeah EVGA does some bragging on the outside of this box which I also wanted to talk about and so they should number one seller of Nvidia based products in the US number one and reliability and service and that is in a survey that was conducted in 2010 number one performance leader in 3dmark Vantage as well as the number one folding at home team in the world those are certainly some points that are worth bragging about so now let's have a look at the GTX 580 itself this isn't a reference card so that means that EVGA has customized the look and feel of the card itself and probably not much else although EVGA does have many custom cards that they do where they use different coolers or they actually overclock the stock frequency of the card past what Nvidia specification is and they'll give you a lifetime warranty on that as well that's one of the other really cool things about EVGA is their lifetime warranty so let's do a quick tour of the card first of all we've got our fan here so that fan spins blows the air at the back of your case this is a rear exhaust design on this card so that means that you're not going to have to worry about the heat being expelled into your case and then having to use hot air to cool the card itself although we are gonna lose a little bit of it at the top here that's probably to decrease the restriction of the cooling mechanism so that we can yeah we can exhaust some out here if we absolutely have to and same goes down at the bottom we have a standard sorry about that guys battery died so standard PCI Express 2.0 16x slot let's move around let's see if there's anything else interesting on the bottom of the card it doesn't really look like it so let's move around to the back of the card so here you can see the GF 110 that is the code name of the GPU that powers the GTX 580 so that's where it's mounted on the PCB you can see the power delivery system is all over on this side you can also see where the memory modules are mounted around the outside of the GPU so that you got nice short PCB traces so it communicate can communicate very quickly with that memory here is the two sli connectors that are required for our 2-way you only need one anyway as well as four-way SLI and last but not least let's have a look at the top of the card where we have our PCI Express 6 pin as well as our PCI Express 8 pin power connectors and then let's move around to the back where finally we have two DVI outputs as well as that one mini HDMI which EVGA kindly provides a mini HDMI to standard HDMI output so you can make proper use of it so thank you for checking out my unboxing of the GTX 580 don't forget to check out my other launch day coverage of this exciting new GPU from Nvidia and don't forget to subscribe to - tech tips