As we all know by now, the GF110 inside NVIDIA's new GTX 580 contains a lot of tweaks and fixes that upped the performance without adding to the GTX 480's astronomical power-draw. Part of this was the combination of driver checks and control chips built onto the board that down-clock the GPU when the power-draw starts getting excessive.
Now, only a week after the graphics-card was launched, someone has managed to come up with a workaround, and it doesn't even require taking a soldering iron to your new £400 baby.
The latest test-build of monitoring software GPU-Z includes a command-line switch that will disable the software checks for the until the PC is restarted, unleashing the full beast that is the GTX 580. There are obviously no permanent changes to the card or the drivers, and the only physical damage might come from pumping an exorbitant amount of power through the components for too long.
The developer is reporting that the limiter simply falls away when the proverbial switch is thrown, even if the card is under heavy load. Tests show the card jumping from a reasonable 210W to an obscene 350W when running FurMark at stock speeds.
The tool - along with more details - is now available for those curious, but it'll probably only be of interest to the enthusiasts and hardcore overclockers out there. For the time being, only FurMark v1.8+ and OCCT are capped, meaning that regular gamers can already flout the TDP with reckless abandon.
