Overclocked and Reference Palit GTS 580 Shown Ahead of Schedule

Even though the official announcement of NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 580 has still not been made, it seems that its partners' cards are somehow being revealed ahead of time, the latest being a pair of Palit models.

As end-users know, NVIDIA will formally introduce the GeForce GTX 580 video card later today, its latest Fermi-based video adapter.

This board will be a successor to the GeForce GTX 480 and will have significantly higher capabilities, its maker promising a substantial boost in both performance and efficiency.

Strangely enough, Gigabyte's model has already been previewed, as was PNY's, and CyberPower and Maingear have even added the card as an option in their gaming systems.

Now, as suggested by a recent report, Palit has been added to the group of hardware makers whose cards have come out early.

This once, however, two cards have made their appearance instead of just one, one of them, as users would expect, featuring higher than reference specifications.

Both cards use the 40nm-based GF110 graphics processing unit (GPU) and, thus, have 512 CUDA cores and support for DirectX 11 graphics rendering.

The so-called 'regular' model naturally has the GPU running at 772 MHz, while the shaders and 1,536 MB of GDDR5 VRAM operate at 1,544 MHz and 4,008 MHz, respectively.

The other card, nicknamed GTX 580 Sonic, has a GPU frequency of 835 MHz, a shader clock of 1,670 MHz and a memory speed of 4,200 MHz.

Needless to say, besides DirectX 11, the newcomers have full support for the CUDA technology, as well as for OpenGL 4.1, PhysX and 3D Vision surround.

Finally, like the original, the cards use dual-DVI and mini HDMI ports for communication with various displays.

The GTX 580 sells for 480 Euro while the Palit GTX 580 Sonic is priced somewhat higher, at 500 Euro.