Introduction

AMD no doubt tried to take top spot for the fastest single GPU video card on the market, but unfortunately NVIDIA snuck the GTX 580 out quickly which offered just blistering performance and fixed all the issues that we had with the GTX 480.

I was always a bit bummed that I never got to test the GTX 480 in SLI. We only ever had one reference card come through our doors and after that we saw MSI, Galaxy and GIGABYTE release models that were all based on their own design, making it pretty much impossible to SLI them.

The main reason I wanted to test them, though, was because we knew it was going to be the fastest dual card setup we would've tested in our testbed. Crossfire wasn't scaling as strong as it is now with the HD 6000 series and the GTX 480 had a nice little jump on the HD 5870.

Today is a second chance for us to look at the top end NVIDIA offering in SLI. We've got an MSI and reference GTX 580 and together we should end up with a load of power. We heard issues of 100c cores with GTX 480s and we experienced that kind of temperature with the GTX 470. The heat's a lot more attractive on the GTX 580, though, and so is power draw and noise.

Since we've already looked at the MSI GTX 580 by itself, we'll just get straight into our testbed setup to see what's going on.