NVIDIA GeForce GTX 570 Review - PAGE 16

Temprature:

To measure core GPU temperature, MSI's Kombustor was used. The idle temperature was taken after leaving nothing running for up to 15 minutes. The load temperature was taken 15 minutes after starting Kombuster for Multi-Core graphics cards.

Even with a lower TDP the GTX 570 had the same load temperature as the GTX 580. In comparison to the 400 series graphics cards though, the GTX 570 was considerably cooler.

Power Usage:

To measure power usage, a Kill A Watt P4400 power meter was used. Note that the above numbers represent the power drain for the entire benchmarking system, not just the video cards themselves. For the 'idle' readings we measured the power drain from the desktop, with no applications running; for the 'load' situation, we took the sustained peak power drain readings at the end of a 30 minute Kombustor run.

The maximum power usage at stock was exceptional, as it consumed less power than the AMD Radeon HD 6870. Overclocking did increase the total power usage, but even with the additional clock speeds the GTX 570 still consumed less power than the GTX 580.

Conclusion:

When the GTX 580 entered our labs a month ago it was clear that NVIDIA had greatly improved the performance, power consumption, acoustics and heat output of their high-end Fermi architecture. The GTX 580 highlighted what a fully equipped 512 CUDA core Fermi graphics processor was capable of and now here we are with another exceptional product using the new GF110 GPU. The GTX 570 however has slightly reduced specifications in comparison to the GTX 580, thus giving it less CUDA cores, ROPs, texture units and a lower memory bandwidth. Despite this, the performance of the GTX 570 came out a notch above the GTX 480, which might not seem overly impressive at first, but when looking at it as a replacement for the GTX 470 the overall performance comes more into focus. In our benchmarks the GTX 570 blew the GTX 470 away and in most benchmarks the two models were in a completely different class all together. This makes the $349.99 USD (with a slightly higher premium for overclocked versions) price tag of the GTX 570 seem very reasonable, as it offers exceptional in-game graphics performance, even when the settings were increased to the maximum level and played on a 2560x1600 monitor.

One aspect of the GTX 570 that is unchanged from the GTX 580 is the use of NVIDIA’s copper vapor-chamber cooling solution and new adaptive fan controller. This design is greatly improved over the 400 series and even when the core was overclocked and under extreme stress, the heatsink managed to keep the GF110 GPU under the 85°C mark, which is well under the 97°C threshold. Additionally, the acoustics on the GTX 570 are also improved over the 400 series as NVIDIA has now enhanced the design of the fan and added an adaptive fan controller. The redesigned fan remained very quiet even at high RPM, and the adaptive fan controller also aids the overall acoustics by maintaining a consistent fan rotation. The redesign of the cooling solution used on the 500 series graphics cards is in my opinion an integral part of the new architecture's success, and I hope to see just as efficient designs implemented throughout future NVIDIA products.

The only issue I have with these new Fermi based graphics cards is the apparent lack of overclocking headroom. In our testing both the GTX 580 and GTX 570 were only capable of small clock speed increases and this greatly limits the maximum performance impact of the card. With only a small increase to the frequencies the GTX 570 enjoyed similarly limited performance increases our testbed of  games and benchmarks. There was some additional performance after the clock speeds were increased, but it is hard to get excited about an increase that at maxium is only 10% above the stock settings.

In all the GTX 570 is another excellent release from the 500 series, and even though the overclocking headroom is lacking, there currently is not another graphics card available that can match its performance in the $350 dollar price range. Except possibly a pair of HD 6850's in CrossFire, but not everyone has the opportunity to run dual graphics cards. With a duo of very capable high-end graphics cards now on the market, NVIDIA is ready to compete head-to-head with both the upcoming AMD HD 6970 and 6950. As of this review, there is very little known about AMD's Cayman architecture, so until we get a card in our hands it is impossible to tell who will be the ultimate victor in the high-end GPU wars. For now though, the GTX 570 is an excellent graphics card that offers great performance up to 2560x1600 pixels and retails for $150 less than the GTX 580.