GTX 570 Review Introduction

Last month, NVIDIA made an impactful product launch, the GeForce GTX 580, which shook the GPU world and tilted performance leadership and performance per Watt figures back in favor of NVIDIA. Such was its impact that it may have caused its competitor to delay upcoming product launches to probably rework them up. Not very far from the launch of those products, NVIDIA launched its second GPU in the GeForce 500 series, the GeForce GTX 570. As the name would suggest, the GTX 570 is the "value" SKU based on the GF110 GPU, while the GTX 580 leads with all components of the GPU enabled.



Reviewed today, the GeForce GTX 570 is GF110 with one streaming multiprocessor (SM) disabled, yielding 480 CUDA cores (same number as that of the GTX 480 from the previous generation), but with a 320-bit GDDR5 memory interface, connecting to 1280 MB of memory. The ROP as a result is 40. Thanks to the improved power efficiency, NVIDIA was able to up clock speeds on the GeForce GTX 570 over the previous generation without having to worry about rising TDP. GTX 570's core is clocked at 732 MHz (higher than that of GTX 480), CUDA cores at 1464 MHz (again, higher than that of GTX 480, translating into higher shader compute power), and 950 MHz (3800 MHz GDDR5 effective) memory, yielding 152 GB/s of memory bandwidth. Palit's GTX 570 Sonic Platinum reviewed today, is based on an in-house design for the PCB and cooler (one of the first for the whole GeForce 500 series). It makes use of a refreshingly silver dual-fan GPU cooler, and a non-reference design PCB, geared for some overclocking.

Packaging

Palit uses their standard package design for the GTX 570 Sonic Platinum Edition.

Contents

You will receive:

• Graphics card
• Driver CD + Documentation
• DVI adapter
• PCI-Express power cable

The Card

Palit's card deviates from the NVIDIA reference design by using a large dual fan cooling solution.


GeForce GTX 570 requires two slots in your system.


The card has two DVI ports, one HDMI port and one 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 GeForce GTX 570 cards in SLI for increased performance or improved image quality settings.


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.