NVIDIA GeForce GTX 570 1.25GB Video Card Review

A Closer Look At The GeForce GTX 570

The GeForce GTX 570 graphics card that we have on the test bench today is a dual-slot single GPU video card that measures in at 10.5″ in length. The first thing you’ll notice with the GeForce GTX 570 is that it looks identical to the GeForce GTX 580 and from the front the only thing that differs on the two cards is the paint used on the front fan shroud cover.

Flipping the GeForce GTX 570 over we find a number of things that were interesting. The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 580 has two digital power phases for the cards 1536MB of GDDR5 memory and six digital power phases for the 512 CUDA cores in the GF110. The GeForce GTX 570 still uses two digital power phases for its 1280MB of GDDR5 memory, but only has four digital power phases for its 480 CUDA cores on the same GF110 ‘Fermi’ GPU core.

This is an interesting power design change that is certainly worth pointing out. Every graphics card product cycle we always get e-mails asking if someone can make their video card the same as the one above it and as you can see this card has hardware changes. Can you make a GeForce GTX 570 into a GeForce GTX 580? The short answer is no. The biggest differences are that the GeForce GTX 570 has 32 less CUDA cores, two less GDDR5 memory IC’s, two fewer power phases and the vapor chamber is different internally. These are differences that you can’t get around by some software hacks.

Speaking of power, the GeForce GTX 570 has two 6-pin PCIe connectors, which is great to see as the GeForce GTX 580 uses one 8-pin power connector that some users might not have on their power supply. The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 580 video card requires a 600 Watt or greater
power supply and has a max board power (TDP) of 250 Watts. The new GeForce GTX 570 video card that we have here today requires just a 550 Watt power supply and has a TDP of 219 Watts. It should be noted that the NVIDIA minimum system power requirement is based on a PC configured with an Intel Core i7 3.2GHz CPU. You might notice that the ‘r’ is missing in GeForce and that is because when we pulled off the protective tape the letter ‘r’ stuck to the tape and not the video card. We were able to stick it back on after this picture was taken, but be sure to make sure you didn’t lose any letters before you throw the tape away!

The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 570 1280MB GDDR5 graphics card has a pair of dual-link DVI-I outputs along with a mini-HDMI output header. Both the Dual-link DVI and HDMI outputs can be used to send high-definition video to an HDTV via single cable (audio too, if running HDMI). A regular sized HDMI header was not used since it couldn’t fit next to the pair of
DVI outputs.

The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 570 graphics card does support SLI and the card has a pair of SLI bridges located along the top edge of the graphics card. The NVIDIA GTX 570 series supports two, three, and quad SLI configurations. NVIDIA didn’t sample us two cards for some reason, so we will just have single card performance numbers for you in today’s article.