A closer look at the GTX 570

When it comes to performance and thermals, reference dual slot cooling on the GTX 580 ended up being much better compared to the GTX 480’s. Nvidia basically took the GTX 580’s cooling and added few design touches in order to provide the GTX 570 with efficient cooling. With help from the vapor chamber, the GTX 570`s cooler is really quiet. Note that the GTX 580 and GTX 570 loos the same at a glance, with only a small difference in the texture.



The plastic hood covers the entire card and all that’s visible is the blower-style fan, which exhausts hot air out the back of the system chassis. GTX 580 and 570 also feature a new adaptive GPU fan control algorithm that smoothes the ramp up/down of the fan speed under load.



GTX 580 and GTX 570 employ copper vapor chamber technology that draws heat off of the GPU. The heat is then dissipated by a large, dual slot heatsink. The GTX 570 has a bit larger dissipational surface compared to GTX 580.










Unlike the long heatpipes which transfer heat from copper base to aluminum fins for dissipation, the Vapor-X chamber is a component that brings both copper-base and heatpipe functions together. The advantage is in direct contact with the GPU and a large surface of only a few millimeters thick Vapor-X chamber, which comes in place of a copper base. It then directly receives and transfers heat to the aluminum fins. Note that despite the performance improvements, visual inspection won’t show much difference between Vapor-X chamber cooling and standard cooling solutions with a copper base.

Built from the same DNA as the GTX 580, the GTX 570 incorporates all the enhancements found in its more powerful sibling. GTX 580/570’s PCB design hasn’t changed much from the GTX 480, but there have been improvements in power regulation circuitry. Nvidia added Advanced Power Management, a feature which monitors consumption and performs power capping – all to protect the graphics cards from excessive power draw and potentially resulting damage.



The GTX 570 has 4-phase power whereas the GTX 580 comes with 6 phases. As you can see from the picture below, the GTX 570 lacks two power phases when compared to the GTX 580.



GTX 580/570 is the same size as Geforce GTX 480, measuring 10.5 inches or 26.7 centimeters in length. GTX 570 has two 6-pin power connectors maximum graphics card power 219W compared to GTX 580 which has one 6-pin and 8-pin power connector and maximum graphics card power 244W.

The video engine didn’t change, it is the same as on GF100, Fermi chips. You still have maximum of two display supported and no DisplayPort, at least not on reference boards. The reference card has two dual-link DVI ports and one mini HDMI. The mini HDMI cable might be bundled by partners and if not it will cost you much more than a standard full size HDMI that you use for your HD TV.