GTX580 water cooled units ready to ship in November

To honour the launch of nVidia's 512 stream GTX580, KitGuru has adopted a multi-stream approach to keeping you up to date on all of the information you need to know ahead of next week's launch. We have already processed, shaded, tessellated and output 3 stunning little pixels of need-to-know info this morning and, as the clock indicates lunchtime in the UK, we have another for you!

Our sources in the Far East have indicated that the new chip will draw at least 35w more than the older Fermi. Naturally, you would expect that with an additional 32 processing units needing power. Running at full pelt with FurMark is likely to generate a significant amount of heat. The question becomes. what is the best way to deal with that heat?

With the launch of the Gigabyte SOC range, we saw that specialist BIOSes could be written for Fermi that would allow the core voltage to rise to around 1.6v!

Now we would NEVER recommend anything like that, but it does show one thing.

With proper cooling the Fermi core is capable of taking a substantial amount of load.

Enter water cooling.

Simularities between the GTX480 and GTX580 designs means that we will be seeing water cooled units on the market very soon after the initial launch. While these will be more expensive than the regular, air-cooled versions, you can expect to see Fermi taken to the max with liquid cooling.

Certainly we expect to see water cooled GTX580 cards hitting well over 20% faster than the GTX480.

Water cooled GTX580 cards could be hitting over the 25,000 market in 3DMark Vantage.

KitGuru says: With each of these new options, nVidia is moving the goal posts for Radeon HD 6970. November is looking like the right month for fireworks!

Give us a rocket below.

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