PNY Releases Self-Contained Liquid Cooled XLR8 GeForce GTX 580s

Care to own a GeForce GTX 580, but don’t care for the added heat that such a beastly graphics card can add to a PC? For quite some time, EVGA has been no stranger to releasing its high-end GPUs with water-blocks built-in, and now it seems that PNY is getting in on the action as well. Its latest XLR8 Liquid Cooled GTX 580s come in two flavors, one with built-in water cooling for the GPU, and another that adds CPU cooling into the mix.

Unlike EVGA’s solutions, which assume a water cooling setup is already in place, PNY has teamed up with Asetek to provide an all-in-one solution. To help keep both the GPU and CPU cooler (if the CPU block version is used), a 120mm radiator is used, which can be connected to the back of the PC as usual, or even up top. If the GPU-only version of this cooler is used, using a top 120mm spot might be the ideal route to take, so that an air CPU cooler can remain as efficient as possible.

The graphics card itself looks normal, just like a reference cooler. For a water cooled option, this struck me as a bit odd, but the reason for it is that PNY still wanted to be able to include a fan, offering a two-fold use. If the water cooling setup is doing its job, the fan speed should never raise to audible levels, while on the other hand, if the pump for some reason ever dies, the graphics card could be disconnected from the rest of the contraption and then become a regular air-cooled card again. (This statement is incorrect, PNY followed-up to state: “The PNY Liquid Cooled GTX 580 relies on both the on-board fan and the liquid cooling assembly, so no they cannot be separated.”)

According to PNY, this cooler will decrease temperatures by 30%, offer 30% quieter acoustics and offer 10% faster performance (thanks of course to a factory overclock). With its built-in water cooling, neither of these ‘XLR8 Liquid Cooled GeForce GTX 580’ cards come that cheap, as expected. The GPU-only model retails for $579.99, or about $110 over a standard GTX 580, while the +CPU version retails for $649.99. In the latter, that’s about a $180 premium to water cool both the GPU and CPU. Expensive, but convenient.