Nvidia GTX 580 Reviews

[Andrew LB]

Trending steady. We have seen a few sales here in Canada which brought the price down from $539 to $499 though Newegg continues to gouge for some reason.

Newegg has really gone to hell over the past couple years. They used to have the lowest prices online, and were typically 25% below what I'd pay if I walked into Fry's Electronics, MicroCenter, or CompUSA (when they had stores). Sad to say, but I usually drive 15 miles to MicroCenter in Tustin, CA to buy most computer parts since most of their prices are easily on par with the online e-tailers, plus I don't have to wait for UPS to come. They even price their CPU's according to the best prices at the internet stores. I paid $199 for my i7 860 a year ago, while Newegg is still $279 right this moment.

And FYI.... Microcenter isn't charging a dime over MSRP for this video card.



I'm quite surprised how nVidia (and ATi) even put up with retailers adding markups over MSRP to their products. A very common practice when drafting a contract between manufacturer/distributor and retailer is to have it contain a clause stating that authorized retailers are not permitted to charge over MSRP. In addition, contracts tend to contain rules about much below MSRP (above dealer cost) a product can be sold. We did that at Oettinger GmbH (a VW and Audi tuner) in order to keep our nationwide dealer network from killing each other, and their own businesses if one shop had a distinct advantage because of low overhead costs. It also ensured we could prevent gray market goods from sneaking in as well as making sure parts were sold and installed via our dealers. Inexperienced body shops tended to do horrible jobs on body kit fit, even simple exhaust installs would wind up crooked.

[onethreehill]

Disable GeForce GTX 580 Power Throttling using GPU-Z
NVIDIA shook the high-end PC hardware industry earlier this month with the surprise launch of its GeForce GTX 580 graphics card, which extended the lead for single-GPU performance NVIDIA has been holding. It also managed to come up with some great performance per Watt improvements over the previous generation. The reference design board, however, made use of a clock speed throttling logic which reduced clock speeds when an extremely demanding 3D application such as Furmark or OCCT is run. While this is a novel way to protect components saving consumers from potentially permanent damage to the hardware, it does come as a gripe to expert users, enthusiasts and overclockers, who know what they're doing.

GPU-Z developer and our boss W1zzard has devised a way to make disabling this protection accessible to everyone (who knows what he's dealing with), and came up with a nifty new feature for GPU-Z, our popular GPU diagnostics and monitoring utility, that can disable the speed throttling mechanism. It is a new command-line argument for GPU-Z, that's "/GTX580OCP". Start the GPU-Z executable (within Windows, using Command Prompt or shortcut), using that argument, and it will disable the clock speed throttling mechanism. For example, "X:gpuz.exe /GTX580OCP" It will stay disabled for the remainder of the session, you can close GPU-Z. It will be enabled again on the next boot....

http://www.techpowerup.com/134460/Di...ing-GPU-Z.html

[ChinStrap]

W1zzard is the man. period.