The GTX580 gets a brand-new heatsink design
The original GTX480 was infamous for its excessive thermal output. Though BIOS updates after launch mitigated some of the heat, three billion transistors chew through an awful amount of power. Thankfully NVIDIA took this into consideration when creating the GTX580 - rather than devouring a predicted 275W, it actually uses slightly less than its predecessor.
This hasn't stopped NVIDIA from thinking seriously about heat on multiple fronts, which is now going to be tackled with some new technology. Called "Vapor Chamber" if you're American, the Vapour Chamber design is one we've seen from Sapphire before - but as Jason confirmed, the NVIDIA implementation is not lisenced from Sapphire.
As seen in the below diagram, a Vapour Chamber works as part of the heatsink's base, and in the GTX580 is constructed from copper. Jason explained how it functions:
"The copper baseplate at the bottom is vacuum sealed with highly purified water, and this water goes through a cycle of evaporation and condensation, where the GPU heats up the water and it evaporates, and carries with it the heat out to the fin stacks. It condenses, and returns back to the GPU."
The Vapour Chamber replaces the more traditional heatpipes, though it performs the same function. This, plus the re-working of the core, has resulted in the quietest card NVIDIA have released since the GTX280!
Jason was clearly proud of the new NVIDIA design, and extricated that it was quieter than "pretty much any card you look at that’s over 200 watts in the market today." That's quite a big call, but we're impressed.
NVIDIA implement power throttling under extreme loads
In a move that's sure to generate crowds of annoyed overclockers and small groups who simply don't know what it means, NVIDIA have worked some engineering magic with the power delivery system of the GTX580. In a similar way to thermal throttling of the GF110 core, where it automatically shuts down or reduces its speed to prevent damage, the power delivery system of the GTX580 will be dynamically throttled to keep the card within its power envelope - whether you want it to, or not.
Though Jason assured us that "[NVIDIA] is only doing this in certain stress applications like Furmark and OCCT, that consume power far above what real-world games produce” and that NVIDIA "didn’t want to limit overclockers”, it remains to be seen just how impactful this change is.
NVIDIA still good at tessellation, say NVIDIA
One of the last things Jason left us with was “as games take more and more advantage of [tessellation] features, our architecture really shines and comes to light in terms of the performance it can deliver. This is what we really built this GPU for; that next generation of content”. HAWX 2 highlights the kind of visual quality we can expect to see in the coming years for computer graphics:
And finally, volumes of the GTX580 card are said to be similar to the launch of the GTX480 earlier in the year, with "over 10,000 cards...already shipped into the marketplace". Jason promised that "when embargo lifts we’ll have product on shelf – this is a hard launch for us". Though we're hopeful that this is true, as of writing only a single Australian store has the GTX580 listed for a price of $682 - so if you're keen on getting one of these cards, you may have trouble.
For an idea of the variety at launch, check out our gallery of twelve NVIDIA GTX580 partner boards, which we'll update as press releases arrive.
We're looking forward to getting a GTX580 card in the Labs, and with the launch of the AMD 6970 coming soon, it's sure to be an interesting next Issue of the magazine...
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