Legit Video Card Reviews

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 580 GF110 Fermi Video Card Review

Manufacturer: NVIDIA
Product: GeForce GTX 580 Video Card
Date: Tue, Nov 09, 2010 - 12:00 AM
Written By: Nathan Kirsch -
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GeForce GTX580 F@H Performance

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 480 Video Card Folding

For those new to F@H, Folding@home is a distributed computing project that, very simply stated, studies protein folding and misfolding. In the last few years Folding@home on graphics cards has gained popularity as it offers great performance per watt. By utilizing the power of the GPU, Stanford has been able to leverage ever evolving graphics technology and put it to good use trying to understand and possibly solve the problem of proteins misfolding. Since the release of the NVIDIA GPU client, their graphics cards have consistently been at the top of points per day, meaning the highest production video card. NVIDIA has been touting Fermi as THE next big thing for GPGPU and projects like Folding@home. Many have been giddy with anticipation since Nvidia first broke the news of Fermi way back on September 30th of 2009.

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 580 Video Card Folding

We ran the Windows GPU2 client on the GeForce GTX 480 and the GTX 580 to see how the cards performed.

  GeForce GTX 480
GeForce GTX 580
GeForce GTX 580 OC
 Work Unit Name
 264 Fs-coil
264 Fs-coil 264 Fs-coil
 Seconds per step
55
48
43
 GPU Idle Temp
 51C 36C 
 36C
 GPU Folding Temp
 80C 69C
 71C
 System Load
254W
243W
 247W
 Noise Level
62dB 59dB
59dB

For our test we ran the 264 Fs_coil work unit on all of the pairs of cards and found that the GeForce GTX 580 was 12.7% faster per step than a GeForce GTX 480. When we overclocked the shaders of the card up to 1740MHz we were able to improve performance and the seconds per step dropped by five seconds! With this nice overclock on the 512 shaders we were able to get a 22% F@H performance improvement over a GeForce GTX 480 reference design! As you can see, the GeForce GTX 580 is faster, quieter and uses less power than a GeForce GTX 480.

Next Page - Temperature Testing


Review Index
Page 1 - A Fixed Fermi Core Called GF110 Goes Into GTX580!
Page 2 - A Closer Look At The GeForce GTX 580
Page 3 - Taking The GeForce GTX 580 Apart
Page 4 - The Test System
Page 5 - Aliens vs. Predator
Page 6 - Batman: Arkham Asylum GOTY
Page 7 - Just Cause 2
Page 8 - Metro 2033
Page 9 - StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty
Page 10 - S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat
Page 11 - H.A.W.X. 2 Benchmark
Page 12 - 3DMark Vantage
Page 13 - Unigine 'Heaven' DX11
Page 14 - FurMark 1.8.2
Page 15 - GeForce GTX580 F@H Performance
Page 16 - Temperature Testing
Page 17 - Power Consumption
Page 18 - GeForce GTX580 Overclocking
Page 19 - Dual LCD Display Testing
Page 20 - Final Thoughts and Conclusions