Review – NVIDIA GTX 580: Fermi at its Best

Features

Vapor Chamber Heatsink

GeForce GTX 580’s heatsink unit. In a glimpse, there is no extraordinary feature that can be noticed immediately. It looks fairly ordinary, with copper base and aluminum fins. There isn’t even any heatpipe, as commonly found on high-end graphics cards. But don’t be fooled, this heatsink utilizes the vapor chamber cooling mechanism that quickly dissipates heat from the GPU core and memory chips. See the topmost picture to learn how it works.

In our test, we recorded a maximum temperature of 73 degree Celsius during full load conditions, at which point the fan (set to auto) was found spinning at 55% of its maximum capacity. When idle, the temperature dropped down to 39 degree Celsius while the fan reverted back to 40%. We also tried to measure out GTX 480’s highest temperature and came up with 93 Degree Celsius (full load) and 58 degree Celsius (idle).

The GeForce GTX 580 incorporates a re-designed fan, meant to reduce noise and vibration during operation.