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The box artwork is identical to the AMP! Edition we reviewed last week. Zotac do love the orange firebreathing dragon.
Inside, the bundle is good. There is a free copy of the excellent Assassins Creed: Brotherhood as well as a software disc, installation literature and various power and output converters (DVI Adapter, Mini HDMI to HDMI adapter and 2x PCI Express power cables).
The custom cooler from Zotac looks stunning. They are calling it the ‘Dual Turbine VGA cooler' and it is marked as ‘ZF3000' underneath their logo in the center. It is built around a black PCB which also looks great.
The GTX580 can work in up to quad SLI formations for enhanced performance and image quality settings.
The card is shipped with two DVI ports and an HDMI port, with the supplied adapter you can hook this directly into an HDMI TV or monitor. As we have said before, the GTX580 is seriously outperformed on a connectivity level by the AMD solutions, such as the HD6970 which can support up to 6 monitors. This card can only handle two screens at the same time. If you want to use three screens, be prepared to buy two of these cards.
The HDMI interface is 1.3 compatible which offers DTS-HD, Dolby TrueHD, AC-3, DTS and 7.1 channel audio support. It also has support for HDMI 1.4 3D output.
Like the reference design card it requires a 6 pin and an 8 pin PCI E power connector to operate properly.
The cooler design is quite stunning. The copper block is fed into several heatpipes which travel the full length of the PCB and are then cooled by the dual fans residing above.
The cooler pokes through to the reverse side of the PCB and is then locked in place by the specialised screws.
An overview of the hardware in GPUz.
Wow that is an amazing looking card. if they could drop the price I think it would sell great for them, ive never seen a 580 peak at 60c in furmark
Wait a minute, are they seriously trying to charge £500 in the UK for a GTX580? thats only 60 less than a 590 !
This has to be voted as one of the prettiest video cards on the market. ever. Its what LL Cool J would have in his rap days.
Nice cooler, if they dropped the price by £100 it would be a great buy, not sure how they worked that out. its not worth £80 more than the Asus Direct CU II, regardless of gold fans.
That is a brilliant graphics card, and I like the PCB design, I wish nvidia had gotten it right with the 590, but maybe thats why partners are charging so much for 580, they know its much better really long term. ?
QUESTION TO THE REVIEWER:
The review says the Zotac GTX 580 AMP² is the model reviewed, and clearly lists 1.5GB…but the Zotac website lists the AMP² as having 3GB. So what model was really reviewed, please? The 3GB AMP²? Or the 1.5GB AMP?
Thanks in advance.
GPuz screen is right on page 2, is 3GB.
Thanks, Zardon, and thanks for the review. FYI page one needs correcting, it currently reads “ships with a 815mhz core clock, an increase from 772mhz on the reference card, and the 1536MB of GDDR5 memory is overclocked from 1002mhz to 1026mhz”
Thanks, sorry about that. fixed.