May not be usable as foot clothing.
This isn’t the first Super OverClock product we have reviewed from Gigabyte, but it is the fastest. Alongside the MSI Lightning and the ASUS Direct CU II GTX 580, the Gigabyte GTX 580 SOC ¡s one of the three fastest single-GPU cards currently available on the market, and is arguably the fastest GTX 5S0 out of the box, Gigabyte use the same “Gauntlet” sorting process in order to find the best and most overclockable GF110 (GTX 580) graphics processors for the SOC series of cards. This means if you purchase a Gigabyte GTX 580 SOC you car nearly guarantee it will clock amongst the top 10-20% of QT5Í 580s in the world- That being said, the Initial performance Is so nigh that unless you’re a benchmarking enthusiast you really don’t need to push the card any harder. 
Also featured on the Gigabyte gtx 560 soc is me Windforce X3 cooler we have grown to love. It is very efficient and, more Importantly, very quiet, We managed to keep fan speeds well below 40%, even under heavy loads. This means that unless you really push the card to its limits, it should remain pretty much Inaudible inside your gaming tower, As you can see from the table, the Gigabyte GTX 580 SOC is overclocked to extreme levels out of the box. This, however, does not guarantee a higher overall clock than other GTX 5S0 offerings. In our testing we were not able to conquer the MSI GTX 580 Lightning that we tested last month, although we did come extremely close. Topping out at a core clack of 945MHz on the core and the same 4700MHz on RAM, we were able to get near-identical benchmark results from the cards. 
As those of you with good memories (or access to last month’s issue) may have noticed, the overclocked GTX 580 SOC performance Is near identical to that of the MSI GTX 580 Lightning and even very similar to the ASUS GTX 580 Direct CU II overclocked performance. This Is because all cards have a fairly similar maximum overclock, and unless you get really lucky, you will find It very difficult to push past 960MHz without encountering instabilities, no matter which hardware vendor you shose to shop with, So, what would we say about the GTX 580 SOC as an overdocker? To be honest, it’s a very, very good card compared to most other GTX 580 offerings from most other companies. But there is still stiff competition to be found in the ASUS GTX 580 Direct CU II and MSI’s GTX 580 Lightning. 
All three of these cards are extremely comparable when pushed to their (air) limits of around 960MHz, so it’s really just personal preference for keen overciockers. For gamers who just want a quick, great card with minimal mucking around, the easy answer is to pick up a Gigabyte GTX 580 SOC, since they’re the better factory clocked cards. Sure it’s only a single frame or so faster than the (stock) ¡MSI Lightning, but if you aren’t an overclocker it only makes sense to get the (slightly) faster card If both are available for the same cost.
