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| Review: Zotac Geforce GTX 570 AMP! (1280Mb GDDR5) |
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| Posted by Winston | |||||||||||||||||||||||
| Sunday, 19 December 2010 23:00 | |||||||||||||||||||||||
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Introduction The battle is definitely heating up between AMD and Nvidia, and I can't wait to see what these two will have in store for us next year. Nvidia are going full steam head with producing mobile processors such as the Tegra 2 for tablets, while AMD are still figuring out their APU (accelerated processing unit). Amidst all of this ... GPU battles between the two are continuing non-stop. It's now come to a point where, I think it's just mind-numbingly crazy! I can't believe how fast both Nvidia and AMD have been releasing their GPUs over the last few months. I'm still trying to figure out where we are in terms of model numbers LOL! Anyway, we're now actually on Series-5 of the Geforce GTX range, and Nvidia have already launched their flagship Geforce GTX 580 GPU just last month. What's Nvidia's 500 series is all about, is that it offers better performance, quieter operation and comsumes less power than their previous 400 series. Since the Geforce GTX 580 is aimed at the high-end and enthusiast gamer, but it will be out of reach for a lot of mainstream gamer, costing somewhere in the region of USD $550.00. So, to cater for the mainstream gamer who's after good performance at the right price, Nvidia decided to release the Geforce GTX 570, which is basically a slimmed-down version of the bigger GTX 580. The table below shows a quick comparison between the GTX 580 and GTX 570. As you can see, there's only a slight difference in terms of numbers, but that is enough to make the GTX 580 perform better than the GTX 570. The GTX 570 has a lower number of CUDA cores and less ram available at its disposal, using a memory interface if 320-bit. But don't let this deter you from taking a look at the Geforce GTX 570. It's still one hell of a card.
In this review, we'll be taking a look at the Zotac Geforce GTX 570 AMP! Edition (1Gb GDDR5) graphics card. The Geforce GTX 570 is aimed at the higher-end gamer who's after good performance at an affordable price... basically the same market ($350 or £280 price range) as the Radeon HD 6970. It features all of Nividia's 3D technologies, which includes CUDA, DX11, OpenGL 4.0, PhysX, Nvidia's 3D Vision, support for 3-way SLI multi-GPU, as well as HD hardware video decode acceleration. This particular model from Zotac comes with an overclocked GPU that's runs at 780Mhz (default is 732Mhz), and contains total of 480 CUDA cores and comes with 1280Mb of GDDR5 ram using a 320-bit memory interface. With all these great features, the new GTX 570 GPU can pump out an impressive texture fill rate of 43.9 billion/sec, with a memory bandwidth of 152 GB/sec. This should give mainstream gamers the high performance they need to enjoy smooth gaming at high resolutions with maximum settings turned on. As far as connectivity is concerned, it comes with a mini-HDMI and dual DVI. There's also a DVI-to-VGA converter, as well as 2 x PCI-E power cables. The package includes a full version of Prince of Persia (DX11) game, which I think is a great added bonus.
Although the Zotac Geforce GTX 570 AMP! is slightly overclocked to 780Mhz (default is 732Mhz), that's only 48Mhz ... it should be enough to make a difference and perform better than a standard GTX 570. Zotac have also included an overclocking tool called FireStorm, which allow users to overclock both the GPU core and memory even higher ... but do be careful with it! I think Nvidia may have released the Geforce GTX 570 just in time before Christmas, as it is attractively priced at around USD $350. It's something I would definitely pay for, especially if it offers good performance and, can handle everything I throw at it. Some have said that the release of the Geforce GTX 570 was a knee-jerk response to AMD's recent launch of their Radeon HD 6870 and 6850. Whatever the case, one thing's for sure ... the Geforce GTX 570 is going to BIG.
We're expecting the Zotac Geforce GTX 570 AMP! to outperform everything we have in out labs, bare in mind we still haven't reviewed the Geforce GTX 580 yet. This will be the first graphics card to run our new DX11 benchmark test ... Futuremark's 3D Mark 11. It will be interesting to see how it compares with the Geforce GTS 460 and other graphic cards. We'll be testing the Zotac Geforce GTX 570 AMP! (1280MB GDDR5) on our test rig, which consists of the following ... Intel Core i5 - 650 (LGA 1156), Gigabyte P55 USB3 motherboard, 4Gb Crucial Ballistix DDR3-2133, Noctua NH-D14 CPU cooler and a Thermaltake ToughPower XT 875W power supply. It's the same system we've been using to test all our graphics card.
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