this will be a quick overview of the
testing setup that I'll be using for my
GTX 580 review so as you can see here I
do have two GeForce GTX 580 s I have one
from MSI and then I also have one from
EVGA so that means that I will be
including sli testing for the GTX 580 as
well as crossfire testing for the Radeon
58 70 which as of right now is the
closest competitor for the GTX 580
although I don't expect that to be the
case for for very much longer in the
future now one of the other comparisons
I also want to make just to include it
in my charts is the GTX 480 which the
580 is replacing and just because it
represents such a good value I also have
two msi geforce gtx 460 hawk edition
cards because two for 60s when they came
out on the market with the exceptional
scaling that you get in crossfire as
well as with the outstanding
overclocking of the hawk Edition card
became a great value for at performance
enthusiasts because to for 60s was
actually cheaper than a 480 but provided
better performance so I really want to
see where the GTX 580 falls in relation
to two overclocked four 60s which are
out there on the market for a very good
price these days now I want to introduce
you to the test bench really quick I
have my 3.8 gigahertz core i7 8 7 5 K I
have that running with 4 gigs of
kingston hyperx ram i've got tuna seuss
crossfire and sli ready motherboard down
there somewhere so I've got a new CPU
cooler now actually it keeps my chip
quite a bit cooler than the a 50 I was
using before this is a silent ex-officio
extreme now down here I have a cougar SX
series 850 watt power supply which is
more than capable of powering all the
cards down here below mind you not all
at the same time that would be
unreasonable and then for my boot drive
I'm using an Intel X 25 M 80 gig drive
now I have changed my monitor setup
slightly as you may or may not be able
to tell that is a 30-inch monitor so I'm
going to be doing all of my benchmarks
other than 3d mark at 2560 by 1600 3d
mark is going to be running the extreme
profile because the reality of it is the
GPUs I'm testing here today are all
premium high-end products so we're going
to use them as they're intended to be
used and that is that extremely
high-resolution and find out how they
all compare to each other stay tuned for
more
now for Starcraft 2 it's pretty obvious
that with every set up from the GTX 480
up through the four 60s in SLI and the
585 80s in SLI we got it almost exactly
the same frame rate so what that comes
down to is a CPU bottleneck it means
that this game cannot take advantage of
the extra GPU power that we're throwing
at it now I was not writing Starcraft 2
with anti-aliasing and if we turned on
anti-aliasing we'd probably see some
improvement however with that unit count
bear in mind we were using a very action
intensive part of the game to do our
benchmarking we were not able to find
any difference between well one very
high-end solution and another even more
ebert high-end solution
mafia 2 is being tested with physics so
we have not included any results for
Radeon cards they didn't fail the test
they just can't run it with physics
for Metro 2033 with physics you probably
noticed the GTX 460 sli config is not in
there and that's because it failed the
reason is that the GTX 460 only has one
gigabit of video memory and what that
means is because the two cards in sli
can't share that video memory you have
effectively one gig of video memory and
at that resolution with those settings
with that particular game you need more
ram so that's what the GTX 480 and the
GTX 580 had as an advantage over those
lower end cards so that's why I wasn't
able to include any 460 sli results
I did another run-through of Metro 2033
with no physics so that I could include
the radion parts and as you can see the
GTX 460 sli config still didn't make it
I got a benchmark result and it kind of
fell in line with everything else but I
can't present that to you guys because
when I was playing through the game it
did not feel right like I had times
where I dipped down and it felt like two
FPS even though at the end the benchmark
reported something like very very
playable so that's why I could not
include that result there
Battlefield Bad Company 2 is actually
one of the games that scaled extremely
well with all of the different cards
that we ran and we were able to generate
very consistent results I did a little
playthrough of the in between going
through the town here and then we're at
the end you find a tank that's the part
of this game that was used for the
benchmarking purposes and trying to take
up a gun at the rocket launcher now you
can't get a consistent run through every
time so I did have to do multiple run
throughs with each GPU and averaged them
out but I think overall we get a result
that's fairly representative of what
each graphics part is capable of in this
particular shooter game
I'm gonna be completely honest with you
guys I didn't have a whole lot of time
to spend with the GTX 580 s my Radeon
5870 crossfire setup was doing some
weird stuff in crisis where I was
getting worse performance than a single
card at 2560 by 1600 I didn't even have
the time to really look up and find out
if that's a common issue because there
aren't too many people who are trying to
run Crysis with anti-aliasing at 2560 by
1600 with really on 5870 crossfire so
that's probably not all that well
documented but basically sorry I
couldn't include those results you can
check out everything else though
for power consumption bear in mind all
of my measurements are taken from the
wall and they are an absolute peak value
so you can expect that usually while
gaming it'll be quite a bit lower but
this is the maximum power consumption
that I was able to pull from the wall
with this system during the entire
benchmarking process for each GPU so
that means that if I was doing something
CPU intensive at the same time as gaming
it could probably be higher so make sure
that when you're budgeting a PSU for
your build if you're going to use one of
these new parts like say for example the
GTX 580 that you plan accordingly so
here's the settings that we ran Metro
2033 on although actually as you saw
from my introduction when I was at home
and I was not at work I had a 30-inch
monitor at my disposal so the benchmarks
were done remember at two different
resolutions for metro 23 2560 by 1600 as
well as 1920 by 1200 although these are
the other settings that are being used
everything is enabled so we're going to
do some quick gameplay here while I just
talk a little bit about the GTX 580 and
what this particular game means to the
market so this is the run-through that I
did in order to test Metro 2033 it's the
level the bridge and I followed this guy
around kill some dudes basically I've
got the GTX 580 set up running right now
and I'm just wanting to show you how
beefy this setup is it really does blow
away everything else especially in the
2560 by 1600 resolution because so many
of the other setups that I tried to run
this game at those settings with just
outright failed they just couldn't do it
and here you can see it's butter smooth
even in 1920 by 1200 everything maxed
out I'm seeing you know 50 frames per
second a lot I better put on my gas mask
in just a second you guys will have some
combat to check out and so that's one of
the things I really noticed about the
lesser setups is that especially when
the action gets a little bit more
intense the framerate dips and it can
even sort of skip a couple and that's
where it becomes unplayable very very
quickly so
got a monster rushing at me Phil the guy
stays very smooth no matter what I'm
doing
shotgun for the FPS still anyway so all
of that aside GTX 580 what does it mean
well it's really really expensive so not
everyone can afford one it's going to be
up over five hundred dollars Canadian at
launch
however unlike its predecessor the 480
NVIDIA has really gotten a few things
under control they've completely fixed
the problem with the excess heat output
for the power compared to the
competition that's on the market today
they fixed the problem with the noise
both by using their innovative vapor
chamber cooler as well as their adaptive
fan profile so make sure you do check
out my videos that are dedicated to
those two aspects of this card I show
how the fan ramps up and down very
slowly so it sounds very smooth and I
also disassemble the msi card so you can
see the vapor chamber cooler up close
and personal and they've added more
power and it comes in at the same price
as a GTX 580 so it's really hard to to
find anything wrong with that I guess
it's a super premium product like I said
so it's quite expensive but it's pretty
much a game changer and it is without a
doubt whether it's a loan or an SLI the
fastest graphics card solution that you
can buy today so thank you for checking
out my performance review of the GTX 580
don't forget to check out a lot of the
other videos that I've done around this
important launch for Nvidia and thanks
for checking out - tech tips don't
forget to subscribe
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