Overclocking
There's no doubt about it, this card can really let fly. By applying a mild increase in voltage - up from 1.08V to 1.10V - we hit a stable 935MHz on the core and an effective 4,500MHz for memory.
Compared to a bog-standard card, that's up by 21 per cent and 12 per cent, respectively. We ran into on-screen artifacts when boosting the speed up further to 940MHz, but we reckon users willing to inject more power will witness even more impressive results.
With our overclock in place, the GTX 580 SOC gets close to delivering the performance of the previous-generation's dual-GPU champion, the Radeon HD 5970.
What's impressive is that Gigabyte's fans aren't deafening at full tilt. Whereas NVIDIA's default GTX 580 cooler raises noise level to 57dB with its single fan operating at 100 per cent, Gigabyte's WindForce cooler manages to keep noise down to 44.2dB with all three fans running at full whack.
