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I'm looking at getting a new graphics card. Whilst I've settled on the GTX 580, I have no idea which vendor (board) I should go for.

This is something that has always bugged me - it's relatively easy to find reviews that benchmark and compare different GPUs against each other, but I've never found a decent resource that compares a bunch of different vendors cards that use the same GPU, e.g. ASUS, PNY, Gainward, etc.

Whilst I'm specifically focusing on the GTX 580 right now, I'd love to know if there are any resources out there that do these kind of benchmarks in general.

Polynomial
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1 Answers1

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right here; they compare what claims to be 53 different versions of this card

Companies like nVidia and ATi have 'board partners' which build and sell cards based on their designs. In fact, all of nVidia's cards are sold in this way, nVidia does not actually sell cards themselves. ATi sells cards directly, but the vast majority of their business is from their board partners. Both companies have a bunch of different board partners and they all create their own version of each card designed by nVidia or ATi.

Each different retail version of a card has different properties. It may have a redesigned cooler, or different inputs and outputs, or even higher clock speeds. Each card is different because each board partner is trying to stand out in the crowd. So you can find cards with better software packages or differing specifications from at least half a dozen different manufacturers. For example, there are currently 69 different incarnations of the GeForce 7600 GT in our database from 26 different manufacturers. And that's just for one card!

As you can imagine, it gets kinda hard to keep all of these cards straight and figure out how they're different. That's where this section comes in. We monitor manufacturer websites and retail outlets to find all the different retail version of a given card and add them to our database. We track all kinds of information about them so you can see them all side-by-side and figure out which one best fits your needs.

Raystafarian
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