Gigabyte is best known for its blue motherboards, undoubtedly some of the best in the business, even so depending on where you lot live y'all will have noticed these days they offer a multitude of other products from mobile phones to figurer mice. Their graphics bill of fare partition has emerged as a top contender in recent years, whether you are looking to save up and buy a vanilla reference board-manner graphics bill of fare or if you are later on a custom blueprint that carries an improved cooling solution out of the box.

In an try to entreatment to the enthusiast community, Gigabyte launched the SOC (Super Overclock) series. Checking out which GPUs belong to the series nosotros noted few AMD-based graphics cards are function of the line, with a majority of products branded with Nvidia's seal, including several variants of the GeForce GTX 560 Ti SOC, the GTX 570 SOC, and almost recently the GTX 580 SOC that we'll be testing today.

Factory overclocked graphics cards are nothing new and the GTX 580 GPU has been around for months now (with nothing new scheduled from Nvidia until side by side year manifestly), but Gigabyte claims to accept the world's fastest GTX 580. Noteworthy competitors include MSI's N580GTX Twin Frozr II/OC, which operates at 800MHz, Zotac's AMP2! ZT-50104-10P, which pushes the GPU to 815MHz, and eVGA'southward DS Superclocked 797MHz carte.

Asus has as well introduced a tweaked GTX 580, which outpaces Zotac'south iteration by a single megahertz, so however a mere five.6% overclock from the default 772MHz. With most board partners scared to push the 244w GTX 580 far beyond its reference spec, nosotros were surprised when Gigabyte announced its solution which treads on deeper h2o than the competition dares to.

The Gigabyte GTX 580 SOC operates at 855MHz or almost double the overclock of Asus and Zotac's cards. For what appears to be a justifiable $35 premium over Nvidia'southward already steep $500 suggested retail price, they are adding a new PCB design and upgraded cooler. Let'southward have a closer look before slamming the card with our battery of functioning tests…