MSI GeForce GTX 580 Lightning 1536 MB Review 33

MSI GeForce GTX 580 Lightning 1536 MB Review

A Closer Look »

The Card

Graphics Card Front
Graphics Card Back

MSI's GeForce GTX 580 Lightning uses an upscaled version of the Twin Frozr III cooler that we have seen on other MSI cards before. Unlike the smaller version of the cooler, this one does not extend far beyond the back edge of the card which will help getting it fitted into smaller cases.

Graphics Card Height

The card requires two slots in your system.

Monitor Outputs, Display Connectors

The card has two DVI ports, one full size HDMI port and one full size DisplayPort. Unlike AMD's latest GPUs, the output logic design is not as flexible. On AMD cards vendors are free to combine six TMDS links into any output configuration they want (dual-link DVI consuming two links), on NVIDIA, you are fixed to two DVI outputs and one HDMI/DP in addition to that. NVIDIA confirmed that you can use only two displays at the same time, so for a three monitor setup you would need two cards.

NVIDIA has included an HDMI sound device inside their GPU which does away with the requirement of connecting an external audio source to the card for HDMI audio. The HDMI interface is HDMI 1.3a compatible which includes Dolby TrueHD, DTS-HD, AC-3, DTS and up to 7.1 channel audio with 192 kHz / 24-bit. NVIDIA also claims full support for the 3D portion of the HDMI 1.4 specification which will become important later this year when we will see first Blu-Ray titles shipping with support for 3D output.


You may combine up to four GTX 580 cards from any vendor in SLI.

Graphics Card Teardown PCB Front
Graphics Card Teardown PCB Back

Here are the front and the back of the card, high-res versions are also available (front, back). If you choose to use these images for voltmods etc, please include a link back to this site or let us post your article.
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Dec 22nd, 2024 18:47 EST change timezone

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