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Palit NVIDIA GeForce GTX 580 3GB Dual Fan Video Card Unboxing & First Look Linus Tech Tips

2011-03-30
so guys I've been informed I should keep it down on account of as to shooting some kind of fail video in the room next to me you should subscribe to our channel if you want to see her videos NCIX Esther so today I'm going to be unboxing the pilot GeForce GTX 580 now this isn't like your your dad's or your Grandpa's GTX 580 this is a somewhat different GTX 580 first of all it has a dual fan cooler second of all it has a DisplayPort output and third of all it has three gigs yes three gigs of memory on a single single GPU card so it supports DirectX 11 3d business around physics CUDA SLI it supports Nvidia surround without 3d vision as well but you'll need two cards for that and this is actually one of the few situations where I would really recommend a card like this with three gigs of memory and I'll get into that a little bit more why later so here are some logos for all of that stuff that I mentioned before it's compatible with Windows 7 it bloody well better be if it's DirectX 11 ready supposedly okay there's some kind of sticker there there's the palette frog page for branding some more branding no more frogs yeah we got another frog on the back there's their frog guy yeah yeah okay what else we got so technical specifications NVIDIA GeForce chipset OpenGL the rack docks okay built for DirectX 11 surround gaming yet more on that later playing 3d 3d is good it is a PCI Express 2.0 16 X card which we will see when we open it up and it requires a minimum 600 watt or greater power supply with at least 12 rather at least 42 amps on the 12 volt rail remember that's a combined 42 amps if you have dual 12 volt rails you have one that's like you know 30 and one another that's 30 that's still good enough to be 42 amps alright inside the box we will find some stuff mostly we will find foam no video cards sorry not today I'm just kidding there's a video card in here okay so there's the GTX 580 but I'm just kidding I'm going to show you guys the accessories first but there is a dual 6 pin - 8 pin PCIe adapter how exciting that's it in there next we have a DVI to vga adapter you're seriously still running a VGA monitor and a card like this and yes I stand by what I said a lot of people are complaining about that particular common but I think it's true I think if you're buying a $500 graphics card you ought to upgrade your monitor if you're still actually running a VGA monitor here's a quick installation guide here's a driver disc don't use it download the latest from the Nvidia website and finally here is I think I'm already yes yes I am already going to like this card because it has a matte black PCB awesome I'm a big fan of the matte black PCB 2 0 reflection nothing just matte black awesomeness everything looks good when it's in silver and matte black so here's a standard GTX 580 PCB for contrast see how shiny that is see how shiny this is not at all all right so here's our standard PCI Express 16x connector here's our dual sli fingers so this card does support up to a two way and three-way and even four-way SLI on supported motherboards a little 4 Way SLI isn't a great value I mean I there's three way but four way really isn't a great value three-way is probably about as high as I would go even for an extreme gaming rig here on the back of the card we find that non-standard output set up that I talked about so we've got dual DVI full-sized HDMI and DisplayPort so we'll contrast that with a standard GTX 580 where we find dual DVI and mini HDMI so that's a little bit different we also do not have a full pci bracket width for exhaust and the reason for that is we are using a non-reference cooler so right here we're using kind of a dual fan these look like oh it's hard to say I think they're probably 80 mils but they might be seven emails I can't quite tell they're low profile fans this is still a dual slot card so you don't need three slots for the card itself though I would still recommend leaving the next slot over vacant so that these fans do have some room to breathe most of the exhaust it looks like due to the shape of the cooler is being done out the back of the card here where you can see it's just full of dense dense fins that's a very dense aluminum thin cooler there's your two fans plugged in so this is a fully custom PCB not just the colour but the entire PCB design because it has actual fan inputs for both of these fans rather than just one and then obviously here on the other side so you can see the the fins through there but that one's not gonna be able to exhaust as much should be okay it's only a single GPU card so it's not like we have to worry about two GPUs getting equal cooling or anything like that so I would expect it to perform at least as well as the stock cooler if not it should actually be better and you look at this to God how many fat heat pipes is that on there it looks like you got about four heat pipes in there I carrying heat over here to the other side as well as over to the front of the card up here on the top looks fairly standard so like I said you got your SLI fingers you've also got a four pin and a three pin connector so just because it has more memory doesn't mean that it needs more power it uses the same amount of power as a standard GTX 580 so that's pretty much everything I wanted to say about this card except why you would buy one so a three gig GTX 580 what is it for well it's for SLI running triple monitor HD plus resolution configurations or if you play with like ridiculous high texture high res texture packs in your favorite games because the reality of it is 1.5 gigs is plenty of RAM for a GTX 580 unless you're running an extreme usage scenario so remember in SLI doing let's say you're doing Nvidia surround with three 2560 1,600 monitors each card has to store all of the textures has to use its own frame buffer to store all of the information necessary for that entire like six times HD resolution that you're talking about with a setup like that I think it worked let is it something like 12 megapixels so when you're in SLI you don't actually get to double your frame buffer when you put two cards together so you run two of these you don't have three gigs of memory effectively you actually only have 1.5 still so if you run two of these or three of these you only have three gigs of effective memory no matter how many cards you're running together so that is why if you are running a great big resolution or if you're running got mostly just big resolutions something like this could be really handy because it could be the difference like you don't just get a linear performance increase from more memory it would be the difference between its playable at you know like 40 FPS or it runs at like 6 FPS because it's completely out of memory and it has to swap so it has to swap to the drive so there you go thank you for checking out my unboxing of the pallet GTX 580 3 gig don't forget to subscribe to Linus tech tips from our unboxings 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