Considering a GTX 580 but need answer to some questions first

Darren - I am very much looking fwd to your results and experiences as I'm considering doing a similar switch myself.

 

SLI= more time adjusting shi... then playing.
I will never forget that 7950gx2,oh what a crap that was(mostly becouse of a bad driver support and heat)

 

I have been considering a switch back as well and doing the same thing. Although why dont you run withhout vsync?

I find some games are better without it on. I know there is the arguement for tearing but i hardly ever see it on my benq.

It really depends on the game for me but total war series bar napoleon run better without it and others like cods and mass effects and dragon age etc..

But aside from that at first I loved the switch from nvidia and drivers up to 10.5 seemed to work well...and i could honestly say my games were running better than before.

However since 10.5 have had issues and now even when i follow correct procedure I get failed driver installs. Just got the latest cod and had to revert back to 10.5...however am running it maxed and loving it.

So am kinda undecided. Please let me know if you get a 580 and how it pans out Darren. Cheers.

I was even tempted by x2 460's as these seem to still have enough beef at 1920x1200 and run quiet and cool.

 

You won't be sorry

 

It's almost always better to have a single monster GPU like GTX 580 then having a dual GPU card like the GTX295/6970 in case a particular game doesn't work well with both GPUs, having two monsters in SLI you can always disable the second card if scaling is troublesome! Nvidia is 10x better at keeping their drivers upto date especially when new games are coming out, ATI is slow to update their drivers and sometimes don't always fix existing bugs! For those waiting for the HD6970 cards there will be growing pains drive wise, Nvidia is ahead in programing the Fermi based cards since the GTX 480 has been out for some time now. The GTX 580 only needs minor updates for the extra 32 shader processors and few minor refinements to the silicon.

-Systemlord

 

can you give me vantage bench on your set up ?

 

made me laugh, thats exactly what happened to me

 

amd release their drivers on a monthly basis. although in the last month, theyve been coming out on a weekly basis. i wouldnt exactly consider this slow to update.

the only thing putting me getting a gtx580 is the power consumption. nvidia advertise that it draws only 240w-ish, but it draws much much more.

from looking at the guru3d review and various other reviews, it draws 20-30w more than a 5850x2 setup (2x 151w cards). which means the actual tdp is closer to 320w (although guru3d guesstimates it at 280w).

the only time the 580 gets close to 240w power draw is in games with a framerate cap or in furmark where the driver forces the card to draw less power).

to me, this is a tad bit of false advertising.

 

You bought a 580 then..welcome back to the best

 

No the GTX 580 will only cap power if certain programs such as Furmark or OCCT if they are drawing more power than would otherwise by normal like in games, the caps are programed into the drivers and are targeted at Furmark and OCCT. Games will never draw as much raw power as these two programs will. The HD5970 still suffers from micro-shutter as seen in reviews of the GTX 580, not good for a card over a year old! Over a year of driver updates and still micro-shutter issues, oh dear! Then there's that ATI cursor corruption issue which was listed on several driver updates, never did fix that completely.

 

the cursor corruption only happened for a few people. a fair few people (myself included) never really had this issue. for those that did experience the issue, it was fixed in 10.2.

hd5970 has screen-tearing because its rendering more frames than the monitor can display. stick it in a setup with a 120hz monitor and the screen tearing wont be visible. turn on vsync and the screen tearing wont be visible. heck you can get screen tearing with a single gpu setup like the 580 as it renders more frames than most monitors can display.

and look at the guru3d review or any review for that matter. the card draws more power than nvidia says it should. the card draws 'less' power in furmark because the driver reduces the power draw. the power draw isnt restricted in any other program. any game that doesnt have a framerate cap will make a gpu render at full load.

 

I was under the impression that 244W TDP was not actual power draw but how much heat the card will produce, I must be mistaken here. Are image tearing and micro-shutter considered the same thing?

 

when most people say microstutter, they are referring to screen tearing because screen tearing is one of the manifestations of microstutter.

the other manifestation is that benchmarks will show youre getting high framerates, but the image looks like its stuttering (this happens in dirt2 if you dont turn on vsync).

 

Almost all the power that goes into the card is output as heat, so TDP is more or less equal to power consumption because graphics cards use all solid state components.

And yeah, it looks like Nvidia are using the new OCP system as a way of marketing the 580 as having a lower TDP than the 480, when it actually uses more power on average. The performance boost is roughly proportional to the extra power consumption, which is around 30W over the 480.

 

Hmmm, I see my thread was locked because some people decided to have an argument there. Charming!

Anyway, there's an interesting article *here* on HardwareHeaven which compares the GTX 580 with HD 6870 CFX and the HD 5970. The GTX 580 beat those two cards in F1 2010 DX11 (due to some kind of bug), CoD: Black Ops, Fallout New Vegas and H.A.W.X. 2, had a higher minimum framerate in Crysis Warhead (something I noticed in my benchmarking too between the GTX 580 and HD 5870 CFX) and kept up with the minimum framerates in the remaining tests for the most part. Shows what an excellent card it is or perhaps how erratic multi-GPU setups can be if the drivers aren't up to scratch?

 

Has anyone heard of the GTX 580 LN2 cooled to 1220MHz core, 2440MHz shader and 1130MHz memory? People are hitting 950 ~ 1000MHz GPU core on air cooling on close to stock voltages, thats a pretty big improvement!

-Systemlord

 

You mean this kind of air cooling?

source: http://lab501.ro/placi-video/nvidia-geforce-gtx-580-studiu-de-overclocking



vmod link: http://lab501.ro/placi-video/nvidia-geforce-gtx-580-studiu-de-overclocking/11

nvidia should take credit also for the way they choose to design the heat sink. You do not need to disassemble the entire card to change the thermal compound or blow the dust out of the card and ATI better learn from them. I wish that more review sites to take this into account when they review a GPU as it is pretty important, well at least for me as I hate dust:bang:.

link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2NRHRWwrm0M&feature=fvsr

 

Thats not even close, lol! Your missing some very cold frost, lol!

http://hwbot.org/community/submission/1077532_

 

LOL!!!!

i was considering doing something silly with my 580 when it arrives. something like remove the shroud and mount a 12CM coolermaster 90cfm fan directly to the vapour chamber, but that just takes the cake.

 

Wrong place. Sorry