Nvidia Geforce GTX 580 cards

[Pave Low]

Well my Christmas(+Birthday) present to myself has just been delivered

(Had been waiting to order for a while but they only came into stock on Christmas Eve and while was dispatched same day, due to the bank holidays had to wait for the courier company to return to work today to deliver them from the local depot)

Unleash the bananas of awesome happiness...

Have just removed old cards and fitted them (I already had the necessary extra capacity power plugs in place ready)

*does anyone else hold their breath when they first turn on the PC after fitting new hardware or is it just me

all good and booted into windows fine, loaded the new 580 drivers (I had previously downloaded ready), rebooted and set Resolution and enabled SLI .....Yep all working fine

Have just had a quick try of Arma2:Operation Arrowhead (the demo scenarios) and they were as smooooooooth as a very very smooth thing being smooth

Now to go through and turn the settings UP on all my games (those that weren't already on max) and then spend some time having to go through and tweak all the options in some of them to find the sweet spot, it's the only "bad" bit

anyone else got 580(s) ? I am very please with my EVGA ones nice quality cards - definitely lower temps with quiet fans even under high load :thumbsup:

[Rocky]

That looks huge, like an old VHS tape lol. Does it take up 2 slots, or 3?!

[Pave Low]

Yeah, one card uses 2x PCI slots

But it's the same size as the 285(s) I took out and also the same size as a 8800GXT which I have in my other PC & IIRC you have/had in yours?

and although they are same size but run cooler and quieter,

one thing I did have to be aware of is that each card does require a SIX pin and an EIGHT pin PCI-E power connector (whereas my previous card used two 6 pin plugs per card)

Click on the photo above for a larger version of the image

but fortunately as I had particularly chosen a modular power supply, was able to just swap power cables over easy peasy, clip-out clip-in and my PSU has plenty of spare power for these two beasts

*although they do provide an adapter in the box (top item in the image) which converts two 6 pin cables into an eight pin plug (but you would still need another free 6 pin plug as well per card).

[JohnTC02]

Soooo jealous!!

There was me thinking my GTX 480 was the dogs!

[Pave Low]

ahh, I really like EVGA, 10 year warranty and.....

when I just registered my cards and found out that I get a free copy of 3DMark 11 Advanced Edition coolio

Soooo jealous!!

while I may be

my bank account is still going

But it's been a rough year and I've done plenty of overtime to squirrel some funds away specifically for it

so what the heck

There was me thinking my GTX 480 was the dogs!

Yeah my 285's were nice but I'd been overdue for an upgrade for a while but was specifically hanging on for one of the new GF110 improved cards

my "problem" is that I have a 30in Dell screen which is great for desktop work and most games, but a few "unoptimised" games (yeah you know who you are) really take some work tweaking to get to run ok at such a high native resolution (2560x1600)

I had even considered getting a newer smaller screen and just one new card to run at games at 1920x1200 or 16800x1050 to take the load off (and use one of the 285's to run the 30in screen in multi-screen), but in the end this all worked out for the best (even though they were late and scarce for Christmas)

I did look at the factory overclocks, but it was silly money! for just a handful more frames (plus the Super-clocked Black Ops 580 had a gopping ugly logo on the card )and I can always over-clock em myself to those levels should I ever feel the need)

[KRP 56]

Sure wish would have given me one of those.