We feel somewhat conflicted about recommending a $600 graphics card, but for a small niche of buyers, Gigabyte's GV-N580SO-15I does actually make sense. True, it costs almost twice as much as a more-than-acceptable mid-range card, and if you’re using a 1080p monitor (or smaller), that extra money spent won’t substantially improve your gaming experience. But for those who have splashed out on a big, high-resolution screen, this substantially overclocked Nvidia GeForce GTX 580 does deliver.
In terms of raw muscle, this is the only single-chip card we’ve seen that clears the 30fps threshold in Crysis at 2,560 x 1,600 with very high settings. And while we’re still looking into building a DirectX 11 Crysis 2 benchmark, in other demanding DirectX 11 titles, this monster card also acquits itself well: Aliens vs. Predator is very much playable at our 30in Dell test screen’s usually forbidding native resolution.
Admittedly, you do pay for that privilege — installation cost aside, this card pushed our test system’s power usage up to almost 400W, but once again that’s kind of acceptable for very high-resolution gaming. A similarly priced CrossFire/SLI setup based around a pair of HD 6950s or GTX 560Tis would almost certainly deliver at least equivalent (if not faster) performance, but would be even more power-hungry and reliant on oft-finicky multi-GPU driver profiles.
Basically, if you’re already spending a grand on a great big screen, it’s not entirely silly to keep splashing out on this graphics card.
