£400 inc VAT • zotac.com • tinyurl.com/3zzw89d
nVidia's previous-generation GeForce GTX 480 performed well, but it ran hot and was priced out of range for many gamers. ATI's top-end cards were slower, but offered better value. With the GeForce GTX 580, however, nVidia has refined the GTX 480's Fermi design and greatly improved performance and efficiency. The standard GTX 580 has 512 stream processors running at 772MHz, with a shader clock of 1,544MHz. Zotac's overclocked AMP2 lists an 815MHz core clock and 1,630MHz shader clock, and offers breath-taking performance. The Zotac dominated our games tests. It was the only card in the group to achieve more than 100fps in Battlefield: Bad Company 2 at 1920x1080 pixels, and still broke 60fps at 2560x1600 pixels. Results in Stalker: Call of Pripyat were also greatly improved over both the GTX 570 (page 66) and ATI Radeon HD 6970 (page 64). Only in Crysis' highest resolution setting of 2560x1600 pixels was its performance matched by another contender. That the HD 6970 and GTX 580 both scored 25fps here suggests that performance depends more on the CPU than the GPU at very high resolutions. The Zotac is also the most future-proof card on test. It'll set you back £400, but you won't need to upgrade it for some time to come. Part of this extravagant price tag is due to the card's generous 3GB of GDDR5 memory. This is of most help to graphics processing at higher resolutions and in games with giant textures. Surprisingly, the card is slightly shorter than ATI's top-end offering, which is testament to nVidia's more efficient design. Zotac's custom dual-fan cooler occupies two expansion slots, so the card needs three in total. Check you have room for it before purchase. If your budget stretches to it, and your desktop PC has enough memory and a powerful processor, then this is undoubtedly the graphics card to get. However, most gamers will find that a cheaper, less powerful card will suffice. VERDICT: Zotac's GeForce GTX 580 AMP2 is by far the most powerful card on test, but it also costs £140 more than any of the competition. If your budget stretches this far, you won't be disappointed.
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