Gainward GeForce GTX 570 1280MB Goes Like Hell Video Card (Page 1)

Introduction

With the GTX 580 launch being extremely rough for us, there was no way the GTX 570 launch could be any rougher. Still, it wasn't easy with the card shipping to us at the last minute and me having to personally pick it up from the courier depot nothing short of 15 hours ago so that I could get this review to you.

Still, everything went to some form of plan in the end and at least I'm able to bring you the GTX 570 review the second the NDA lifts; even if it does have to share the lime light a little with 3DMark 11. I'm not sure if it was done on purpose by one of the companies or what, but you would assume that they both can't be that happy; you'd think we'd have a little bit of space between the two launches. Really, though, it doesn't matter now.

What does matter is that we're looking at the GTX 570 here; the replacement to the GTX 470 which really hasn't existed for a bit now. Over the past few months it's been all about two models from NVIDIA; the GTX 480 which was the fastest single GPU card on the market, and the GTX 460. The latter could beat a GTX 480 when it was paired up with a second card. It costs less and supported surround vision. It was a killer card and SLI was a killer combination that just yielded massive performance. The GTX 460 was one of the first cards to bring real value to the SLI market.

Gainward has been able to step straight out of the box at launch, though, with the GTX 570 and bring us a Goes Like Hell edition straight away. The GLH series has lived true to its name over the recent launches and we've got our fingers crossed that it holds some truth here, too. Before we cover the performance, though, let's take a look at the package Gainward has put together while also taking the time to have a closer look at the card itself.

The Package

Checking out the package, you're not going to see anything that you haven't seen before. Looking at the front of the box, though, you can see we're dealing with a Goes Like Hell edition card which is always a good thing. The only thing that might look a bit different is the power connector. This particular one is a dual 6-Pin PCI-E to 8-Pin PCI-E connector.