At the end of last week, we reported that MSI is working on developing a 3GB version of the popular GTX 580 Lighting graphics card and now the first pictures of this yet-unreleased GPU have made their way to the Web.
When taking a look at the N580GTX Lightning Xtreme Edition, it becomes apparent that MSI hasn't made any major design changes to the card as it still uses the same Twin Frozr III cooler, although this time it is painted black instead of gunmetal gray and the fans are blue.
Speaking of the fans, the retail box also states that these were redesigned in order to prevent dust build-up inside the card and also feature a new smart temperature sensor that should cool the PCB and GPU more efficiently.
Outside of these modifications, the
Lighting Xtreme Edition is also expected to carry an aluminum backplate, presumably for increasing the card's stiffness.
However, the most important improvement that the N580GTX Xtreme Edition brings to the table is the increased amount of video buffer memory, that now reaches 3GB in capacity.
The should help the card perform better when running SLI multi-monitor games or in titles such as Metro 2033 or Shogun 2, that use high-resolution textures.
Sadly, these are all the details that are available for now as
MSI hasn't disclosed any info regarding the card's operating speeds, but we'd expect them to be close to those of the regular Lighting.
Pricing also hasn't been announced, but the N580GTX Lightning Xtreme Edition should become official at the end of May.
Nvidia's
GeForce GTX 580 is based on the GF110 core and it packs 512 stream processors, 64 texture units, 48 ROP units, and a 384-bit memory interface that is usually linked to a 1.5GB GDDR5 frame buffer.
The stock clocks of the graphics card are set at 772MHz for the GPU and 1002MHz (4008MHz effective) for the memory. (via
VR-Zone)
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