NVIDIA GeForce GTX 580 GPU Features Detailed At PDXLAN

GeForce GTX 580 Has Vapor Chamber Cooling & Runs at 47dB

NVIDIA has put up on Youtube a video of their “unreleased GPU” aka the GeForce GTX 580 at PDXLAN 16.5. The video shows Tom Petersen, Director of Technical Marketing at NVIDIA, introducing ‘an upcoming’ video card. We all know the new card is the GeForce GTX 580 thanks to online rumors and leaks. What is interesting to us is that Mr. Petersen has released some details that were not yet made public. They also showed demos of the GeForce GTX580 running Alien versus Mutant Triangles, Endless City and of course Call of Duty: Black Ops. Take a look at the video clip below to see what we will be talking about in more detal.

Call of Duty: Black Ops has never been shown to the public live, but this video clip has some footage in it at around the nine minute mark. The big news from last nights reveal is that NVIDIA showed off the new technology behind the GeForce GTX 580 that has been super secret until now.

They start out by claiming that this card IS the fastest DirectX 11 GPU on the planet. They then show that the card has a brand new thermal cooling solution on it called the vapor chamber. Tom Petersen claims the GeForce GTX 580 is nearly silent during gaming, which is huge news as the GeForce GTX 480 was a bit on the loud side when gaming or during heavy use. They mention that the card has a new adaptive GPU fan controller as well, which is attributed to the quieter operation. The slide also shows that NVIDIA designed the GeForce GTX580 for better SLI cooling performance with a new cooling design. They chamfered the plastic fan shroud to allow for better cool air intake when multiple cards used are right next to each other. If you look close in the slide they showed last night you can see that there is an indent in the card just to the left of the GPU fan and this is what they are talking about here.

They then showed a detailed slide of their new Vapor Chamber technology. This is nothing new to the PC industry as other companies have used Vapor Chamber for a number of years now. In fact ATI/AMD has used vapor chamber cooling technology on their cards for a number of years. We sent word to AMD that this video was published and if they used Vapor Chamber technology and they replied with this.

“We first started shipping with Vapour Chamber coolers with the ATI Radeon HD 2900 series on products and have continued to develop them on every generation since (with patents pending); we will have further refinements on upcoming GPUs. With regards to variable fan controllers it is hard to see what is new here boards with 3 or 4 pin fan headers should have fan control anyway; with the ATI Radeon HD 4000 Series and on we moved from external controllers to fully programmable system on the GPUs own internal microcontroller; this enable a fine grained, continuously variable control that handles multiple fan curves which change according to the temp ranges you are dealing with.” – AMD North America PR

The final little nugget that NVIDIA gave out is that the upcoming GeForce GTX 580 runs at just 47dB and the company claims that it has nearly half the noise level as the GeForce GTX 280 (53db) from a couple generations ago. The also show that it is quieter than the GeForce GTX 480 and the GTX 280!

As you can see the NVIDIA marketing team released a good bit of information last night at PDXLAN 16.5 and the GeForce GTX 580 video card has some interesting new features. If NVIDIA has really improved performance and decreased the temperatures and noise levels then AMD has something to be worried about. Expect a full review of the card here on Legit Reviews when it comes out. Rumor has it coming out later this week, so get ready!