NVIDIA GeForce GTX 580 Review

Core Temperature & Acoustics

For all temperature testing, the cards were placed on an open test bench with a single 120mm 1200RPM fan placed ~8” away from the heatsink. The ambient temperature was kept at a constant 22°C (+/- 0.5°C). If the ambient temperatures rose above 23°C at any time throughout the test, all benchmarking was stopped. For this test we use the 3DMark Batch Size test at it highest triangle count with 4xAA and 16xAF enabled and looped it for one hour to determine the peak load temperature as measured by GPU-Z.

For Idle tests, we let the system idle at the Windows 7 desktop for 15 minutes and recorded the peak temperature.


The efficiency of the vapor chamber can clearly be seen in this test. Even though the TDB of the GF110 core is within spitting distance of the older GF100, temperatures are never allowed to climb above the 80 degree mark. Even at this extremely lower temperature (compared to the GTX 480), the fan never increases its speed past the 60% mark which means a very quiet gaming experience. Honestly, the difference between the GTX 580 and the outgoing GTX 480 in this test is simply unbelievable.

System Power Consumption

For this test we hooked up our power supply to a UPM power meter that will log the power consumption of the whole system twice every second. In order to stress the GPU as much as possible we once again use the Batch Render test in 3DMark06 and let it run for 30 minutes to determine the peak power consumption while letting the card sit at a stable Windows desktop for 30 minutes to determine the peak idle power consumption. We have also included several other tests as well.

Please note that after extensive testing, we have found that simply plugging in a power meter to a wall outlet or UPS will NOT give you accurate power consumption numbers due to slight changes in the input voltage. Thus we use a Tripp-Lite 1800W line conditioner between the 120V outlet and the power meter.


Both idle and load power consumption is kept well in check even though the GTX 580 has its full 512 cores enabled. The reason behind this is explained on the next page. We would recommend a good 600W PSU for this card nonetheless.