Cd Rom Expansion Bus

MSI N580GTX Lightning Video Card Review

Introduction

Microstar International (MSI) is a Taiwan-based computer hardware manufacturer founded in 1986. Primarily a designer and manufacturer of PC motherboards, MSI has expanded its business into barebones PCs, servers and workstations, communications devices, consumer electronics, Notebooks, Netbooks, graphics cards, and other various electronic products. Its company motto, "Quality Products Create Faithful Customer," believes its underlying corporate strategy of designing and manufacturing quality devices for various markets and letting its high-quality reputation earn it the trust and respect of electronics consumers worldwide.

On the test bench today is MSI's flagship GeForce GTX 580 product: the MSI N580GTX Lightning . This video card features an overclocked NVIDIA GeForce GTX 580 GPU paired with 1536MB of GDDR5 memory. Cooling the whole device is MSI's impressive Twin Frozr III cooler. The goal of this review is to determine whether or not this ~$525 video card can justify its price premium over the lower priced MSI R6970 Lightning, or if the R6970 Lightning can be overclocked enough to be competitive with the N580GTX Lightning. We will also compare to a reference GTX 580 to see what it offers over a standard GTX 580.

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 580 GPU

NVIDIA launched the GeForce GTX 580 (codename GF110) on November 9th of 2010. It was NVIDIA's flagship gaming GPU at the time, and would be until the GTX 590 was launched in late March of 2011. The GTX 580 represents what Fermi should have been at launch. It is built on a 40nm wafer process and is comprised of three billion transistors for a total of 512 CUDA cores arranged into 16 streaming multiprocessors. There are four graphics clusters containing 64 texture units and 48 raster operator (ROP) units. The graphics clock (texture units and ROPS) is 772MHz, while the processor clock (CUDA cores) is twice that, at 1544MHz. The video card has 1536MB of GDDR5 memory clocked at 1002MHz (4008MHz DDR), mated to the GPU via a 384-bit memory bus for a maximum theoretical memory bandwidth of 192.4GB per second. It is designed to safely draw 244 Watts with a thermal threshold of 97 degrees Celsius.

At launch, NVIDIA estimated an MSRP of $499 USD through its board partners. As of now, GTX 580 board prices vary from $470 to $590, and even up to $700 for a water-cooled option from EVGA.

Computerized Spirit » Everything You Need to Know about Computer ...

Physical parts of computer come under the category of computer hardware. It can be changed once in a while in comparison with computer software. Normal users don’t see most computer hardware because it is enclosed as embedded systems. The term computer hardware is generally used for personal computers.

Internal computer hardware consists of motherboard having central processing unit and random access memory. Random access memory provides temporary storage of data where as CPU is used for doing all type of calculations. Second major component of computer hardware is Bus that is used to make common connection between several circuits. People can choose any type of buses as per their needs. Generally these are PCI bus, PCI-E or AGP bus, ISA bus that is outdated and UCB that is commonly used.

Computer can’t be run without power supply that is case including transformer, voltage control and fan. Computer hardware includes storage controllers that are helpful in controlling the hard disk, floppy disk, CD-ROM and other drives. These can be assembled on the motherboard or expansion card directly.

Video display controller is used to generate output for the computer display. Computer bus controllers are also come under computer hardware. These are used to connect computer to external peripheral devices like printers and scanners.

Sometimes computer hardware includes some removable media writers such as CD, CD-ROM Drive, CD Writer, DVD, DVD-ROM Drive, DVD writer, DVD-RAM Drive, Floppy disk and Zip drive. These are not permanently fixed in the computers and whenever you want you can remove them easily.

Tape drive, Internal storage and hard disk of the computer offers different levels of data storage like tape drive offers backup or long-term storage, Internal storage keeps the data safe inside the computer for later use while the hard disk offers medium-term storage of data. Sound card usually translates signals from the system board into analog voltage levels. It has terminals to plug in speakers.

If you want to connect your computer to other computer or Internet you require computer networking that helps you to communicate with other computers. Other networking hardware includes modem that is used for dial-up connection, and network card that is used for DSL/Cable Internet or connect to other computers.

Computer hardware includes internal as well as external components of a computer system. External components of computer hardware consist of some essential input/output devices such as keyboard, mouse and monitor. Other useful computer hardware components are speakers, headset, joystick, trackball, image scanner, microphone, etc.

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