Sparkle Calibre X580 Video Card Review

Videocards/VGA Reviews by stefan @ 2011-03-10

The Calibre X580 graphics card offers impressive performance in most games and synthetic benchmarks, comes with a beefy but very efficient (and silent enough) air cooling solution from Arctic Cooling and if that wasn't enough, it is overclocked from the factory (810MHz GPU/ 2016MHz memory)!

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A Closer Look Continued

The massive cooler sports 5 heatpipes that travel through all the heatsink and are being cooled with the help of the 3 PWM controlled fans; the 3 fans are connected together so they run at the same speed at all times, and are powered from the same onboard connector:

 

 

 

From both sides of the PCB, we can see a large aluminium plate that covers the VRM, and helps it cool more efficient:

 

 

 

 

On the opposite side of the heatsink, we can find another Calibre brand logo:

 

 

 

In the top right corner, we can find one six-pin power and one 8-pin PCIe power connector:

 

 

 

If we look between the heatsink and the PCB, we can discover the large plate that covers the GTX 580 GPU:

 

 

 

On the back of the PCB, we can discover that the cooling solution is longer that the card itself:

 

 

 

The VRM heatsink is kept in place with small screws and plastic washers, to avoid scratching the PCB surface:

 

 

 

The card also have some unused holes, coming from the stock cooling PCB design:

 

 

 

The main heatsink is fixed with the help of 4 screws loaded with springs:

 

 

 

In the VRM area, we can also find some stickers representing the card serial numbers and the firmware version, helpful for the engineers when the cards comes to service:

 

 

 

On the I/O shield, we can find two DVI connectors and one miniHDMI:

 

 

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