GTX 580 spotted in the wild, orders being placed

KitGuru has been trawling the web for new information about the Fermi series since we first touched a GTX480 box at CeBIT back in March. Now a barrage of flags on forums across the globe indicate that real people are able to buy and own the GTX580, as well as systems for less than £1,000. We went hunting, this is what we caught.

One of our spies received a mail blast from YOYOTech and when we checked Google for YOYOTech and GTX580 we got Futuremark, Overclock.net and Bit-Tech among others all with pretty much the same info.

Here's the link that our contact received by email, but be aware that the GTX580 info KitGuru's interested in has been surrounded with ‘tinsel' and other offers. The salient parts are top and bottom of the page.

The YOYOTech site itself has home page banners for both the GTX580 card and the system. Performance wise, the image on the home page claims that the new GTX580 will be 30% faster than the GTX480 in 3DMark, which could be true.

Clicking on the card link, the first thing we noticed is that the picture is some kind of place holder. The real card is rumoured to have a vapor chamber cooling system and so will look nothing like this. Also, if the technical specification provided is correct, it will be drawing 244w and 27cm long. So this picture is not real.

You get more info from the system specification here. It claims that the GTX580 will ‘Rip past the GTX480 like it's standing still'. Bold claim.

There's a discrepancy about system memory speed between the specification next to the picture and the one underneath, one says 1333 and the other has 1600.

For £999 the system and spec look tidy enough, but we'd need to bench it to have any kind of opinion.

That brings us back to the GTX580 card. KitGuru predicted that the price would be £429 from the main resellers. Looking at the way Scan and eBuyer shimmied on the Radeon HD 6850 pricing (going low for launch and then popping up £20 or £30 in the days that followed) we might still be right.

KitGuru says: If these offers are genuine and the performance is up to 30% more than GTX480 with a new cooling system etc, then this will be AMD's toughest challenge yet at the high end. With the £399 price tag, the gauntlet has been well and truly thrown down for the Radeon 6970.

Comment below or in the KitGuru forum.

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