 This will be a quick overview of the testing setup that I'll be using for my GTX 580 review so as you can see here. I do have two g-force GTX 580s I have one from MSI, and then I also have one from EVGA So that means that I will be including SLI testing for the GTX 580 as well as crossfire testing for the Radeon 5870 which as of right now is the closest competitor for the GTX 580 Although I don't expect that to be the case for for very much longer in the future now one of the other comparisons I also want to make just to include it in my charts is the GTX 480 which the 580 is replacing and Just because it represents such a good value. I also have two MSI g-force GTX 460 Hawk Edition cards because two 460s when they came out on the market with the exceptional scaling that you get in crossfire as well as with the outstanding overclocking of the Hawk Edition card became a great value for a performance enthusiast because Two 460s was actually cheaper than a 480 but provided better performance So I really want to see where the GTX 580 falls in relation to two overclocked 460s which are out there on the market for a very good price these days now I want to introduce you to the test bench really quick. I have my 3.8 gigahertz core i7 875k I have that running with 4 gigs of Kingston HyperX RAM I've got an ASUS crossfire and SLI ready motherboard down there somewhere so I've got a new CPU cooler now actually it keeps my chip Quite a bit cooler than the a50 I was using before this is a silent X if isio extreme now down here I have a cougar SX series 850 watt power supply Which is more than capable of powering all the cards down here below mind you not all at the same time That would be quite unreasonable and then for my boot drive. I'm using an Intel x25 M 80 gig drive now I have changed my monitor setup slightly as you may or may not be able to tell That is a 30 inch monitor So I'm going to be doing all of my benchmarks other than 3d mark at 2560 by 1600 3d mark is going to be run in the extreme profile because the reality of it is the GPUs I'm testing here today are all Premium high-end products, so we're going to use them as they're intended to be used and that is at extremely high resolution And find out how they all compare to each other stay tuned for more Now for Starcraft 2 it's pretty obvious that with every setup from the GTX 480 up through the 460s and SLI and the 580 580s and SLI we got it almost exactly the same frame rate So what that comes down to is a CPU bottleneck it means that this game Cannot take advantage of the extra GPU power that we're throwing at it now I was not running Starcraft 2 with anti aliasing and if we turned on anti aliasing we'd probably see some improvement However with that unit count bear in mind We were using a very action-intensive part of the game to do our benchmarking We were not able to find any difference between well one very high-end solution and another even more uber high-end solution Mafia 2 is being tested with PhysX so we have not included any results for Radeon cards They didn't fail the test they just can't run it with PhysX For Metro 2033 with PhysX you probably noticed the GTX 460 SLI config is not in there And that's because it failed the reason is that the GTX 460 only has one gig of video memory And what that means is because the two cards in SLI can't share that video memory you have effectively One gig of video memory and at that resolution with those settings with that particular game you need more RAM So that's what the GTX 480 and the GTX 580 had as an advantage over those lower end cards So that's why I wasn't able to include any 460 SLI results I did another run through of Metro 2033 with no PhysX so that I could include the Radeon cards And as you can see the GTX 460 SLI config still didn't make it I got a benchmark result and it kind of fell in line with everything else But I can't present that to you guys because when I was playing through the game it did not feel right Like I said before the GTX 460 SLI was not in there and I was not able to find any difference Because when I was playing through the game it did not feel right Like I had times where it dipped down and it felt like 2 FPS even though at the end the benchmark reported something like very very playable So that's why I could not include that result there Battlefield Bad Company 2 is actually one of the games that scaled extremely well with all of the different cards that we ran And we were able to generate very consistent results I did a little play through of the in between going through the town here and then where at the end you find a tank That's the part of this game that was used for the benchmarking purposes And I'll try and take out the Rocket Launcher Now you can't get a consistent run through every time so I did have to do multiple run throughs with each GPU and average them out But I think overall we get a result that's fairly representative of what each graphics card is capable of in this particular shooter game I'm going to be completely honest with you guys I didn't have a whole lot of time to spend with the GTX 580s My Radeon 5870 Crossfire setup was doing some weird stuff in Crisis where I was getting worse performance than a single card at 2560x1600 I didn't even have the time to really look up and find out if that's a common issue Because there aren't too many people who are trying to run Crisis with anti-aliasing at 2560x1600 with Radeon 5870 Crossfire So it's probably not all that well documented but basically sorry I couldn't include those results you can check out everything else though Power Consumption For Power Consumption bear in mind all of my measurements are taken from the wall and they are an absolute peak value So you can expect that usually while gaming it will be quite a bit lower But this is the maximum Power Consumption that I was able to pull from the wall with this system during the entire benchmarking process for each GPU So that means that if I was doing something CPU intensive at the same time as gaming it could probably be higher So make sure that when you're budgeting a PSU for your build if you're going to use one of these new cards like say for example the GTX 580 that you plan accordingly So here's the settings that we ran Metro 2033 on although actually as you saw from my introduction when I was at home and I was not at work I had a 30 inch monitor at my disposal so the benchmarks were done remember at two different resolutions for Metro 23 2560x1600 as well as 1920x1200 although these are the other settings that are being used everything is enabled So we're going to do some quick gameplay here while I just talk a little bit about the GTX 580 and what this particular game means to the market So this is the run through that I did in order to test Metro 2033 it's on the level of the bridge and I follow this guy around kill some dudes Basically I've got the GTX 580 setup running right now and I'm just wanting to show you how beefy this setup is It really does blow away everything else especially in the 2560x1600 resolution because so many of the other setups that I tried to run this game at those settings with just outright failed They just couldn't do it and here you can see it's butter smooth even at 1920x1200 everything maxed out I'm seeing you know 50 frames per second hold on I better put on my gas mask in just a second you guys will have some combat to check out And so that's one of the things I really noticed about the lesser setups is that especially when the action gets a little bit more intense the frame rate dips And it can even sort of skip a couple and that's where it becomes unplayable very very quickly so I got a monster rushing at me kill the guy stays very smooth no matter what I'm doing Shotgun 40fps still anyway so all of that aside GTX 580 what does it mean well it's really really expensive so not everyone can afford one it's going to be up over $500 Canadian at launch However unlike its predecessor the 480 Nvidia has really gotten a few things under control They've completely fixed the problem with the excess heat output for the power compared to the competition that's on the market today They fixed the problem with the noise both by using their innovative vapor chamber cooler as well as their adaptive fan profile so make sure you do check out my videos that are dedicated to those two aspects of this card I show how the fan ramps up and down very slowly so it sounds very smooth and I also disassemble the MSI card so you can see the vapor chamber cooler up close and personal And they've added more power and it comes in at the same price as the GTX 580 so it's really hard to find anything wrong with it I guess it's a super premium product like I said so it's quite expensive but It's pretty much a game changer and it is without a doubt whether it's a loan or an SLI the fastest graphics card solution that you can buy today So thank you for checking out my performance review of the GTX 580 don't forget to check out a lot of the other videos that I've done around this important launch for Nvidia and thanks for checking out Linus Tech Tips don't forget to subscribe