Thread: Gigabyte gtx580 super overclock - preview

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GIGABYTE GTX580 SUPER OVERCLOCK PREVIEW

The NVIDIA GTX580, released last year, may not be the latest Graphics card or GPU from the company, but it remains the best one yet, particularly because all overclocking records, (at least the relevant ones) are courtesy of this GPU. By now you know all that the GTX580 has to offer (DX11 etc…) no need to go into that. As most of us here will be concerned with the OC potential, I took a quick look at the GPU before testing. (Not able to test anything right now, hopefully sorted in the next few days)

We’ve seen the ridiculous overclocking headroom of the Asus DirectCUII GTX580 which remains king of them all at present and we’ve seen some promising numbers from the MSI GTX580 Lightning. The only one left is the GTX580 Super Overclock from GIGABYTE which is what we have here. A rather late entry into the market, it – much like the others mentioned above – deviate from the reference NVIDIA design completely. Opting for better and more VRMs, a standout VRC area powered by several (5 to be exact)
NEC/TOKIN Proadlizer decoupling film capacitors. These are used in parallel, to further decrease ESL, increase capacitance and obviously aid in noise absorption at high switching frequencies. (10MHz+) This card makes uses of an impressive 12 phase power system (10+2) so you’ll not lack for power when going for those super high speeds under LN2.

Control of the power is through the ONSEMI ADP4100 multi-phase buck converter that allows controlling of up to 6-phaes. I’m not sure how IT is able to control the 12 on this graphics card, but I take it some of the phases are paired which would make it fit nicely into the 6-phase operation limit. (I doubt it though because there are 3x TI ACT08 Quad 2-input and gate chips, and each would handle 4 phases feeding back to the ADP4100, hence only 3 phase control is needed, well under the maximum 6. Can’t be sure, my electronics knowhow is none existent at best). Regardless the max voltage that one should be able to put through this card (at which point you’ll likely kill it) via software should be 1.6V. Moving on from there, the card uses a MICROCHIP PIC16F1937 EEPRON for the BIOS which has a switch whose purpose I’m not sure of right now. (Will update later with performance numbers)

Memory is oddly enough courtesy of Hynix GDDR5 SDRAM (H5GQ1H24AFR. I’m not sure if these are the T2L at T2C chips rated at 1.25GHz [SD/CK Rate] for both). Gigabyte has clocked this memory at 1.025 GHz so there should be some room for overclocking there, but out the box you get around 196GB/sec of bandwidth. (We’ve come a long way from the 64GB/sec of the 8800GTX on the same 384-bit bus). This memory is passively cooled with some thermal pads making contact with the heat sink plate and hold down for the cooler. Core clocks are set to 855MHZ (Global) VS the reference 772MHz.

As stated earlier I can’t test the GPU right and those results will come later, but I’m sure there’s some impressive performance and overclocking headroom to be had with this card. Stay Tuned