One of them is air-cooled and the other has water cooling

Dec 16, 2011 08:24 GMT  ·  By

There seemed to be quite a lot of activity around the new and/or upcoming AMD Radeon HD 7000 graphics cards, so MSI decided to even the scales with a couple of high-end NVIDIA models.

People going through the EVGA official website may stumble upon a pair of video adapters that weren't there before.

Said video boards are known as GeForce GTX 580 Classified Ultra and GeForce GTX 580 Classified Ultra Hydro Copper.

For the most part, they are identical, at least as far as performance goes.

What distinguishes between them is their choice, or EVGA's choice, of cooling implements.

It is quite easy to guess which one has what, from the names: the former has an air cooler, while the latter has a waterblock.

Previously, EVGA FeForce GTX 580 Classified cards didn't go beyond clock speeds of 855 MHz for the GPU, 1,720 MHz for the shaders (CODA cores) and 4,212 MHz for the memory (GDDR5 VRAM).

These new ones do: the graphics processing units work at 900 MHz, while the 512 CUDA cores have a frequency of 1,800 MHz and only the 3 GB of GDDR5 memory operate at the same 4,212 MHz as before.

Both newcomers have a memory interface of 384 bits and custom PCBs (printed-circuit boards).

Also, they feature one NEC Proadlizer capacitor each, plus Super Low ESR SR-Cap capacitors and high-frequency 3 MHz shielded inductors.

Not only that, but the products boast support for EVBot, 4-way SLI (multi-GPU configurations) and 14+3 power designs.

Finally, neither card has begun to ship to consumers, and it isn't clear when that happens, but at least the prices are well and truly known.

The GeForce GTX 580 Classified Ultra has a tag of $619.99 (475.96 Euro) while the GeForce GTX 580 Classified Ultra Hydro Copper is priced at $749.99 (575.76 Euro).

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EVGA GTX 580 Classified Ultra
EVGA GTX 580 Classified Ultra Hydro Copper
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