PNY GTX 580 XLR8

After the launch of the GF100 that's found on the GeForce GTX 480, 470, and 465 cards, it became apparent that some changes were necessary in order to not only streamline the architecture but also improve upon some of the issues that became apparent; namely, its size and heat output. The GTX 460 resulted, providing significant performance at power draws and temperatures that were very reasonable.

But the GTX 460 isn't a flagship gaming card, and with AMD's Radeon 6000 series flagship cards on the horizon, Nvidia had to counter this and continue their success with a new lineup. We really didn't expect the 500 series to come so soon, and in fact the GeForce GTX 580 caught most people by surprise. Nonetheless, the 580 is upon us as Nvidia's latest premium flagship gaming graphics card.

Today we're looking at the PNY GTX 580 XLR8, which is based on the reference Nvidia design. The XLR8 series is part of a new family of gaming products from PNY, and is targeted to consumers looking to maximize their gaming performance.

Promising improved performance and lower temperatures, the GTX 580 looks to be impressive on paper. But real gaming tests are where reputations are made or broken. So let's jump in and take a closer look at the PNY GTX 580 XLR8 and find out if it's the fastest horse in the stable.
Overall, there's nothing ground-breaking different between the GF100 (GTX 480) and GF110 (GTX 580) architecture, though there are a few changes. The CUDA cores have been bumped up to 512 and Texture Units have also increased slightly from 60 to 64. Polymorph Engines have increased to 16, along with higher core and memory clock speeds. Given these modest increases and nearly identical architecture, we're a bit surprised this card isn't the GTX 485 or GTX 490, but Nvidia doesn't often follow conventional wisdom when designing or naming their models. In any event, the GTX 580 is upon us, promising improved power efficiency and temperatures. 

As you can see above, the GTX 580 is a modest bump up across the board from the 480. Our guess is this will translate into a modest increase in performance as well, nothing earth-shattering. We'll see during our benchmarking tests shortly.
Let's now take a closer look at today's GeForce card, the PNY GTX 580 XLR8.

From PNY: "Introducing NVIDIA GeForce GTX 580, with screaming performance and an innovative vapor chamber thermal design. The GTX 580 rips through the latest games while running quieter than the previous generation. As you’ve come to expect from a GeForce GTX GPU, GTX 580 packs support for all the premium GTX gaming technologies such as NVIDIA Surround, 3D Vision, PhysX, and SLI. GeForce GTX 580 – don’t play DX11 without it."
Below are the specifications:

• Core Clock: 765 MHz vs. 675 MHz standard
  
• Processor Cores: 336
  
• Processor Clock: 1530 MHz vs. 1350 MHz standard
  
• Texture Fill Rate: 42.84 Billion/sec. vs. 37.8 Billion/sec. standard
  
• Memory Amount: 1024MB GDDR5
  
• Memory Data Rate, effective: 3700 MHz vs. 3600 MHz standard
  
• Memory Interface: 256-bit
  
• Memory Bandwidth: 118.4 GB/sec. vs. 115.2 GB/sec standard
  
• On-board Outputs: DVI-I, DVI-I, and Mini HDMI
  
• Additional Outputs Supported: VGA
  
• Bus Type: PCI Express® 2.0

from : pureoverclock.com