Final thoughts and rating
Benchmarking with a variety of modern games has revealed a truth; for single-monitor gaming with a GeForce GTX 580, 3GB of GDDR5 memory is overkill.
At resolutions of up to 2,560x1,600 with ultra-high image quality settings, it's tough to distinguish between a stock-clocked GTX 580 armed with a 1.5GB or a 3GB frame buffer - both deliver near-identical performance across a range of current games.
A pointless product, then? Not quite. Taking NVIDIA's fastest GPU and attaching one of the largest servings of GDDR5 memory currently available on a gaming card is a recipe for bragging rights, and extreme users connecting two or more cards in SLI for niche configurations such as 3D Vision Surround may find that multiple GPUs benefit from a large, shared frame buffer.
A competitive £400 price tag ultimately makes the HAWK Edition card a strong contender, and the large quantity of memory does have an element of future proofing about it. However, if it's high-quality, single-monitor gaming you're after, a pre-overclocked GTX 580 with a standard 1.5GB frame buffer will deliver better results at around the same price.
The Good
Competitive pricing; one of the cheapest 3GB GTX 580s on the market
Excellent cooler keeps temperature and noise down to a minimum
3GB frame buffer may benefit extreme SLI configurations
The Bad
3GB of GDDR5 memory is largely overkill for single-monitor gaming
Near-triple-slot width makes SLI configurations a tight squeeze
No factory overclock
HEXUS Rating
Inno3D GTX 580 3GB HAWK Edition
HEXUS Where2Buy
The Inno3D GeForce GTX 580 HAWK Edition 3GB graphics card is available to purchase from ebuyer.com.
HEXUS Right2Reply
At HEXUS, we invite the companies whose products we test to comment on our articles. If any company representatives for the products reviewed choose to respond, we'll publish their commentary here verbatim.
