Overclocking
As you can see above, the stock card is pre-overclocked on the core from 772MHz to 815MHz which is a good, if somewhat conservative overclock. The same principle has been applied to the memory with just a 25MHz (100MHz effective) overclock applied. While this values are nothing to be scoffed at I had confidence the ZOTAC GTX580 3GB AMP2! had much more to offer, especially as the card affords overvoltage settings (even if the Firestorm utility does not). So using the Afterburner Utility which does allow voltage adjustment on the core I set about overclocking the card.
Because of the massive cooling capabilities of the card I set the voltage to maximum and began a thorough testing. The card reached 950MHz on the core before locking the test setup up. Dropping the core down gradually I settled for a maximum overclock of 911MHz. Not the best overclock we have seen but its still very good giving a 7.8% increase over the factory overclock and almost 20% over stock GTX580 speed! The good news doesn't end there either becuase the memory, as suspected clocked very well giving us an extra 145MHz(580MHz effective) over the already pre-overclocked value hitting 4684MHz!
Temperature
To measure the temperature of the card we first measure the ambient temperature. Our review station resides in an air conditioned room with the temperature set to a comfortable 23c.
We expected good results from this card because of the sheer size of the cooler however we were not expecting results as good as this. While the idle results are nothing out of the ordinary, hitting a maximum 62 celcius while placed under the extreme load of Furmark is a fantastic achievement. The cooler is clearly very capable and can absorb a great deal of heatdump but can it perform quietly?
Let's find out...
As you can see above, the stock card is pre-overclocked on the core from 772MHz to 815MHz which is a good, if somewhat conservative overclock. The same principle has been applied to the memory with just a 25MHz (100MHz effective) overclock applied. While this values are nothing to be scoffed at I had confidence the ZOTAC GTX580 3GB AMP2! had much more to offer, especially as the card affords overvoltage settings (even if the Firestorm utility does not). So using the Afterburner Utility which does allow voltage adjustment on the core I set about overclocking the card.
Because of the massive cooling capabilities of the card I set the voltage to maximum and began a thorough testing. The card reached 950MHz on the core before locking the test setup up. Dropping the core down gradually I settled for a maximum overclock of 911MHz. Not the best overclock we have seen but its still very good giving a 7.8% increase over the factory overclock and almost 20% over stock GTX580 speed! The good news doesn't end there either becuase the memory, as suspected clocked very well giving us an extra 145MHz(580MHz effective) over the already pre-overclocked value hitting 4684MHz!
Temperature
To measure the temperature of the card we first measure the ambient temperature. Our review station resides in an air conditioned room with the temperature set to a comfortable 23c.
We expected good results from this card because of the sheer size of the cooler however we were not expecting results as good as this. While the idle results are nothing out of the ordinary, hitting a maximum 62 celcius while placed under the extreme load of Furmark is a fantastic achievement. The cooler is clearly very capable and can absorb a great deal of heatdump but can it perform quietly?
Let's find out...
