GeForce GTX 580 Temperatures

Benchmark tests are always nice, so long as you care about comparing one product to another. But when you're an overclocker, gamer, or merely a PC hardware enthusiast who likes to tweak things on occasion, there's no substitute for good information. Benchmark Reviews has a very popular guide written on Overclocking Video Cards, which gives detailed instruction on how to tweak a graphics cards for better performance. Of course, not every video card has overclocking head room. Some products run so hot that they can't suffer any higher temperatures than they already do. This is why we measure the operating temperature of the video card products we test.

To begin my testing, I use GPU-Z to measure the temperature at idle as reported by the GPU. Next I use FurMark's "Torture Test" to generate maximum thermal load and record GPU temperatures at high-power 3D mode. The ambient room temperature remained at a stable 20°C throughout testing. FurMark does two things extremely well: drive the thermal output of any graphics processor much higher than any video games realistically could, and it does so with consistency every time. Furmark works great for testing the stability of a GPU as the temperature rises to the highest possible output. The temperatures discussed below are absolute maximum values, and not representative of real-world temperatures while gaming:

As a result of NVIDIA's new hardware power monitoring circuitry, temperatures are kept to their lowest level in many years. At first I suspected GPU load or power throttling, but there's no evidence of this on the GPU-Z histogram when we re-tested (at 26°C ambient room temp). Regardless, the nearly-ambient 32°C idle temperature and modestly warm 70°C loaded temp are something NVIDIA should be proud of... and the competition should take notice of. On the overclocked ASUS ENGTX580 model, average temperatures were identical to reference tests; not that adding 10 MHz to the clock should really amount to much. Once overclocked to 925 MHz with 1145 mV, idle temperatures climbed only a few degrees while loaded temps climbed to 80°C. Even with the added voltage and overclock, the ENGTX580 was quiet under load and ran cooler than a GeForce GTX 480.

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