Nvidia Geforce GTX 570 launched on December 7, 2010, and still holds the spot of Nvidia’s second fastest single-GPU graphics card. Geforce GTX 570 cards are made for hardcore gamers - it packs a nice punch and is priced similarly to the Radeon HD 6970. Gainward offers several different Geforce GTX 570 versions but our today’s test subject is the GTX 570 Golden Sample Edition.
Geforce GTX 570 is based on the GF110 GPU which can be found on the faster Geforce GTX 580 as well. By overclocking the Geforce GTX 570, users can get Geforce GTX 580 performance, but of course, overclocking does introduce other risks.
Nvidia strapped its reference Geforce GTX 570 cards with quality cooling that uses vapor chamber technology. However, Gainward decided to strap its GTX 570 Golden Sample with a special dual fan cooler.
So, the card runs at 750MHz for the GPU, 1500MHz for shaders and 3900MHz (effectively) for the memory. Just to remind you, reference clocks stand at 732MHz for the GPU, 1462MHz for shaders and 3800MHz for memory.
Geforce GTX 580 works at higher clocks – 772MHz GPU, 1544MHz shaders and 4000MHz memory. Furthermore, the Geforce GTX 580 has 512 shaders compared to 480 shaders on Geforce GTX 570. This tells us that the Geforce GTX 580 is faster than the Geforce GTX 570, but since Gainward overclocked its GTX 570 Golden Sample, we expect the performance difference to be at least lower than with reference Geforce GTX 570 cards. In any case, we’ll try to overclock our GTX 570 Golden Sample further and attempt to top the Geforce GTX 580.
