NVIDIA GeForce GTX 580 GF110 Fermi Video Card Review

Temperature Testing

Since video card temperatures and the heat generated by next-generation cards have become an area of concern among enthusiasts and gamers, we want to take a closer look at how the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 580 graphics card does at idle and under a full load.

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 580 Video Card Idle Temperature:

As you can see from the screen shot above, the idle state of the NVIDIA GeForce GTX580 drops the GPU core clock frequency down to 50.6MHz and the memory clock down to 67.5MHz to help conserve power and lower temperatures. At idle on an open test bench the GeForce GTX 580 video card temperature was observed at 36C. The fan speed on the card was at 40% and nearly silent as it spins at just 14000 RPM.

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 580 Video Card Load Temperature:

We fired up FurMark and ran the stability at 640×480, which was
enough to put the GF110 GPU core at full load in order to get the highest
load temperature possible. This application also charts the temperature
results so you can see how the temperature rises and levels off, which
is very nice. The fan on the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 580 video card was
left on auto during temperature testing. This test showed that the peak temperature reported on the open air test
bench was just 71C.

Since Furmark is clearly being impacted by the new power monitoring hardware we fired up OCCT 3.1.0 and set the shader complexity to eight and let the application run for 30 minutes. We only read 71C on Furmark, but with OCCT we were able to get the board up to 85C and it looks like performance here is being limited by the monitoring hardware as the FPS was really high and then it was greatly reduced when the card reached about 60C. We pushed the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 580 as hard as we could in games and other activities like F@H and hitting 85C in OCCT was the highest that we could get the card.