14 DAY TRIAL // Micro-Star International seems quite eager to make sure the consumer base has as many reasons as possible to peruse its extensive product lineup, so it put together a new iteration of NVIDIA's currently strongest board.
The thing about the 500 Series of GeForce graphics cards from NVIDIA is that it is drastically superior to the 400 line.
While the high-end GTX 480 and 470 were plagued by overheating and too high a power draw, the GTX 580 and 570 overcame the drawbacks while also bringing a strong benefit in raw might.
This is all the more relevant knowing that, for all its faults, the GTX 480 actually was the strongest card on the market after it was released.
With this to fuel the popularity of the more recent boards, NVIDIA's partners have been quite active in their development of custom models.
The newest such adapter has come out of MSI's labs and, unlike most of its rivals, uses watercooling instead of an air solution.
The card is part of the aptly named HydroGen (its name is N580GTX HydroGen/OC) series and its waterblock is of the all-copper micro-channel variety.
N580GTX HydroGen/OC has the GF110 graphics processing unit working at 823 MHz, a fair jump from the stock 772 MHz.
Meanwhile, the 512 CUDA cores feature a shader clock speed of 1,645 MHz instead of 1,544 MHz, while the 1,536 MB of GDDR5 VRAM feature a frequency of 4,276 MHz (4,008 MHz stock).
Even with all these modifications, the liquid cooling system still drives the temperature lower than reference by 24 degrees Celsius.
Needless to say, 3-way SLI multi-GPU configurations are supported, as are PhysX, 3D Vision Surround, CUDA and all other NVIDIA technologies. Finally, dual-DVI and HDMI outputs ensure compatibility with many displays.
European online stores should have it on pre-order for 563 Euro, while the official product page is found here. Deliveries will start later this month.