I am still concerned that with heavy overclocking, especially on water and LN2 the limiter might engage, and reduce clocks which results in reduced performance. From my own testing I can confirm that the limiter only engaged in Furmark and OCCT and not in other games I tested. NVIDIA also explained that this is just a work in progress with more changes to come. At this time the limiter is only engaged when the driver detects Furmark / OCCT, it is not enabled during normal gaming. NVIDIA emphasizes this is to avoid damage to cards or motherboards from these stress testing applications and claims that in normal games and applications such an overload will not happen. As soon as the power draw exceeds a predefined limit, the card will automatically clock down and restore clocks as soon as the overcurrent situation has gone away. When either Furmark or OCCT are detected running by the driver, three sensors measure the inrush current and voltage on all 12 V lines (PCI-E slot, 6-pin, 8-pin) to calculate power. In order to stay within the 300 W power limit, NVIDIA has added a power draw limitation system to their card. GTX 580 – Voltage and current monitoring chips, labelled U14, U15 and U16 To shorten the story, NVIDIA uses a mix of hardware monitoring chips AND FurMark detection at the driver level to limit the power draw.

Memory: 1536MB GDDR5 1002MHz real clock (or 4008MHz effective, see Graphics Cards Memory Speed Demystified for more details), 384-bit bus width.

Now we have the explanation of this strange FurMark screenshot.

In short, when FurMark is detected, the GTX 580 is throttled back by the power consumption monitoring chips.

And still like AMD with the Catalyst drivers (see FurMark Slowdown by Catalyst Graphics Drivers is INtentional!), there are somne optimizations in ForceWare R262.xx when FurMark (or OCCT) is detected (hehe, maybe the weak link?). Like AMD with the Radeon HD 5000 series (see )ATI Cypress (Radeon HD 5870) Cards Have Hardware Protection Against Power Virus Like FurMark and OCCT), NVIDIA has added dedicated hardware to limit the power draw. For more detail about new things brought by the GF110, check this page out.īut the real new thing is somewhere else: the power draw is now under strict control. This card is powered by the GF110 GPU, which is a refresh of the GF100 GPU. NVIDIA has officially released the successor of the GTX 480: the GeForce GTX 580.

For apple download Geeks3D FurMark 1.35