Removing the shroud, we can see a bracket attached to the PCB supporting the fan and heatsink. The fan is a circular shaped with vertical fans as opposed to bladed, making it more ideally suited to pushing air towards the back. The ring surrounding the fins at the top provides stability to prevent fan vibrations. The heatsink itself has departed from heat piped based designs hence the smaller footprint.


And underneath the metal bracket, the PCB is exposed revealing the layout of the individual components. The PCB appears very packed with components and the VRM power circuitry looks very robust. The board employs a 6 phase power design for the core and further 2 phases for the memory, as indicated by the chokes. The thermal pads on the base of the metal brackets are for additional cooling on the memory modules and circuitry.


The GF110 core is a monster of a chip, with a 520mm squared die size packing over 3 billion transistors. If anything, the integrated heat spreader is indicative of the core underneath, creating a large enough surface area for maximum heat dissipation.


There are a total of 12 128MB memory modules for 1.5GB of on-board GDDR5 memory. The modules have been sourced from Samsung and carry the model name K4G10325FE-HC04. These are rated at 0.4ns for a rated speed of 5Gbps. The memory on the GTX580 only come clocked at 4008MHz, suggesting high overclocking headroom.


The CHiL CHL 8266 voltage controller enables voltage control and monitoring, making it an excellent addition for overclockers. Although the ZOTAC GTX580 doesn’t come with any overclocking utilities, MSI Afterburner can be used to tweak the voltages and overclock the card.


One of the ways Nvidia have attempted to tackle the heat generated by the core is a vapour chamber cooler. The copper heat plate contains liquid in the base (the raised middle part of the plate that is in contact with the GPU). The liquid evaporates and absorbs further latent heat through its phase transition to vapour. This rises and condenses on the outside upper part of the heat plate releasing heat which is then transmitted to the overlying fin array whilst the condenser fluid circulates around the outside of the heat plate. This type of cooler is a first for Nvidia, who have traditionally opted for heat pipe based heatsinks. The advantage of the vapour chamber is the larger surface area of the heat plate for greater heat transfer.


Heat that is transferred to the heat sink across the fins is dissipated by airflow from the fan towards the exhaust port on the rear of the card. The design proved to be very efficient on the ASUS GTX580 and has also been employed on the recently released AMD HD6900 series of cards.



The two GTX580 seen here are of the ASUS (bottom) and ZOTAC (top) cards. They are identical in layout, components used and circuitry design. Using two GTX580s in SLI should be no issue, regardless of branding.