After testing the GeForce GTX 580 at stock clocks there is clearly a little bit of a love hate relationship going on with this card. The one thing you can't take away from it is the raw performance that it offers out of the box. Considering you have essentially got the performance of two slightly overclocked GeForce GTX 460's in not just a single PCI Express card, but more importantly a single GPU version, is nothing short of fantastic. The low stock though, and a high price tag is no doubt going to be a turn off for most people. Today we try and add some extra value to this graphics card with the help of MSI's own Afterburner software and see what happens when we overclock this bad boy, in terms of performance. - TweakTown

MSI GeForce GTX 580 Overclock Video Board Review

As we mentioned, we used Afterburner and proceeded to bump the voltage up to give us some more room on the core. From their stock 772MHz we ended up with a nice round sounding 900MHz overclock. That in turn pushed the shaders clock to 1800MHz. As for the memory, we rounded that off to 4200MHz effective. Not a huge gain on the memory, but that extra core speed should yield with it an nice performance increase. The GeForce GTX 580 is just a beast of a card when it comes to overall performance. Instead, because it took us a few weeks to get one and stock seems to be quite bad, we had to drop the availability score a bit.

Outside of that though, we again talk about performance which is just awesome, and cranking this core up to 900MHz yields even more performance. Sure, the power jumps up a bit, so does the noise and overall heat, but you're just dealing with a massive amount of performance. So seeing those massive numbers again disappoint us a little when it comes to multi monitor support. This is a fast card that becomes even faster when we overclocked it. This could have been a great card, if it offered multi monitor support and the price was a little more aggressive. Of course that is something that will always be a point for discussion.

Once you've spent the money and have the card in your system, you're not going to be disappointed because stock doesn't matter since you have it. And who cares about the money, because it's already gone. All that really matters is the performance and in that scenario this is just a fantastic card. Some people might say you don't need this kind of power, but with the resolutions we can game at and the detail levels we can create, no single board offers us a 60 frames average in every situation, which means we can make use of the power. And in the future new games will certainly tap into that extra power to offer higher game pleasure.

Single monitor, massive resolution and high detail levels are where this card is aimed at and it covers those areas extremely well. If you have the need, the need for speed and you have no interest in multi GPU setups, as of this moment this is the graphics card to own and to simply enjoy its raw gaming performance.