Introduction

Last week NVIDIA released their latest high-end graphics card, the GeForce GTX 580. It delivers substantially improved performance over the GTX 480 and also reduces power consumption and acoustic footprint compared to previous generation. ASUS has sent us their GTX 580 which is basically the NVIDIA reference design card with a sticker slapped on it. ASUS did not change the PCB or cooling design at all, but still added a slight clock improvement of 10 MHz over the reference design which is about 1.3% so the difference in performance should be negligible. Considering the card comes at no price increase compared to other reference cards this is still a good thing, because free things are always nice to get.