After the somewhat disappointing release of the GTX590, I decided to turn my attention again to one of the best video cards on the market, Nvidia's GTX580. This card has been leading the single GPU charts since it was released and Zotac sent us their fully pimped out AMP! Edition. Is this one of the best ways to blow £450?
Upon first appearance, the Zotac GTX580 AMP! Edition looks slightly uninspiring, after all there isn't a sexy cooler included like the Asus GTX580 Direct CU II we reviewed last month, but with a core clock set at 810mhz this looks to be one of the fastest ‘out of the box' versions available.
Product | nVidia GTX 580 | Zotac GTX580 AMP! Edition |
Shader Units | 512 | 512 |
GPU | GF110 | GF110 |
ROPs | 48 | 48 |
Transistors | 3000M | 3000M |
Memory Count | 1536MB | 1536MB |
Memory Bus Width | 384 bit | 384 bit |
Core Clock | 772mhz | 810 mhz |
Memory Clock | 1002 mhz | 1025 mhz |
Considering ive seen the HD6990 for £50 more, Zotac clearly have forgotten to check the pricing on this one,.
I always hate to see high end cards with special names, just having a sticker over the reference design. its lazy and I cant believe they think they can get away with charging £70 more than the reference card. Does it cost £70 to flash the bios? Most 580s hit those speeds without any effort. easy way to save the money.
£450? eh, surely thats a typo on scans store.
£900 for 3 screen gaming, bargain lol
£900 before you buy the three screens !
Seriously though, this is a great card, but I agree, the pricing is about £80 too high. I hope people dont realise that every 1mhz of overclock should cost about a £5. most reference GTX580’s hit higher than these clocks without any effort.;
I bought a reference 580 in January for £370 on ebay and I have it running at 850 core and 1100 memory. Basically identical to this, bought two months ago for less money.
My sticker isn’t as nice though :p
GTX580 is nvidias best card, no doubt about it. the pricing is semi reasonable too on most of the models
Wow I was hoping Zotac would have had a nice zalman cooler on this, they normally work with them on these AMP! special models. very poor showing.
After the Asus model that was reviewed here a while ago, this does look rather lacking. I always dislike when companies release a card with a reference cooler, its fine at launch time, but its been a very long time since the 580 was released. a little moer effort from zotac would have been good.
The results are good, but the temperatures due to the reference cooler could have been a lot better. I am not sure I like the asus 3 slot cooler however, but Zotac could have approached this from a higher ground rather than aiming for the entry style cooler on such a high clocked model.