Today we shall review a very nice GeForce GTX 570 from Gigabyte's Super Overclock Series which stands for very efficient cooling, custom PCBs, flexible settings and great stability at high clock rates.

Specifications

GPU: GeForce GTX 570 (GF110) Interface: PCIe 2.0 x16 GPU clock rate (ROPs/shaders): 845/1690 MHz (the standard is 732/1464 MHz) Memory clock rate, physical (effective): 950 (3800) MHz (standard) Memory bus: 320-bit Stream processors: 480 Texture units: 60 (BLF/TLF/ANIS) ROP units: 40 Dimensions: 281x139x43 mm Board color: blue Output connectors: 2 x DVI-I, mini-HDMI Multi-GPU mode: hardware SLI

Design

Comparison with the reference design, front view

Gigabyte GV-N570SO-13I	Reference NVIDIA GeForce GTX 570

Comparison with the reference design, rear view

Gigabyte GV-N570SO-13I	Reference NVIDIA GeForce GTX 570

You can see this is a custom solution with redesigned power circuitry that dissipates less heat and is called to lower temperatures and improve stability. Speaking of the latter, the overclocking potential is really great, you can easily go from the standard 732 MHz to 845 MHz, or even to the extreme 920/1840 MHz. That's what Gigabyte calls "Durable".

It's interesting that the card actually has a 384-bit bus and the PCB is quite similar to that of GV-N580SO-15I. There are just some minor changes in the power supply unit. Perhaps, going with it was cheaper than producing a PCB with a 320-bit bus, so Gigabyte just installed 1280MB instead of 1536MB, thus also reducing the bus down to 320 bits.

Maximum resolutions and frequencies:

• 240 Hz maximum refresh rate
• 2560 x 1600 @ 60Hz max. digital (DVI) resolution
• 2048 x 1536 @ 85Hz max. analog (VGA) resolution

Note that while a standard GTX 570 has two 6-pin supplementary power connectors, this model has one 8-pin and one 6-pin connector.

Cooler

The cooler features a vapor chamber, heatpipes and a cover with as many as three fans. The vapor chamber cools down both the GPU and memory chips.

Note that the speed of each fan is controlled separately. You can see that the third one almost doesn't rotate if GPU load is low. All three fans are very high-quality, and even extreme overclocking causes just a minor increase in rotation speed. Speaking of noise, there's almost none.

The graphics card occupies two expansion slots.

Temperature monitoring results

Standard clock rates

Overclocked to 920/1840/4400 MHz

You can see that cooler efficiency is very high even at extreme clock rates. Speaking of those, the card is designed for overclockers and lets you adjust GPU/memory clock rates and voltages by means of the Gigabyte OC Guru utility.

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