300W ONLY fÃ¶r VGA card !!!

Redzo · Post by **Redzo** » Tue Jun 06, 2006 5:52 am

It makes you wonder if those ppl at ATI and Nvidia just plain dumb or what ?
Just read an article here http://www.anandtech.com/tradeshows/showdoc.aspx?i=2770
about directx 10 cards that will need from 130 up to 300W power ! Imagine having 2 of those ! 600W for SLI/Crossfire system ! One would think that ppl learned something from prescott but...PSU ppl are looking forward to this and are talking about kilowatt PSUs...

There is NO WAY I will buy any of this crap.
How on earth will they cool this sh** ?

ryboto · Post by **ryboto** » Tue Jun 06, 2006 5:56 am

i agree with you, but, you weren't the first with the news!
http://forums.silentpcreview.com/viewtopic.php?t=31947

i really don't care who posted it first, as this topic really needs discussion.. while anand hints that the next next generation will begin to show better power efficiency, I wanna know why we aren't seeing it sooner.

qviri · Post by **qviri** » Tue Jun 06, 2006 6:01 am

They can't come out with a 300 watt card for popular use. Intel tried with a Prescott, they couldn't break 150 watt. And video cards are harder to cool, as well.

They might have enthusiast models designed explicitly to be watercooled. But mainstream will never hit 200 watts.

frostedflakes · Post by **frostedflakes** » Tue Jun 06, 2006 6:11 am

Maybe it's the optimist in me, but I find up to 300w per card to be very hard to believe. I don't think VGA manufacturers are that stupid, it would be suicide, Prescott all over again. 130w, though, I could see, ATi is already only about 10w away from that mark with their X1900XTX.

Like qviri suggested, there may be a limited number of these alleged 300w cards (probably quad-GPU or something like that) available for enthusiasts and system builders, but if VGA manufacturers have a lick of sense mainstream will stay well below 100w.

JazzJackRabbit · Post by **JazzJackRabbit** » Tue Jun 06, 2006 6:16 am

FUD IMHO.

Manufacturers always tend to exagerate specs and it's a blessing for various companies because an average John Doe will go and buy that 300W OCZ videocard PSU. They've said nVidia 5800 will require 150W of power and in reality it turned out to be half of that. Even now xfx, evga claim their superclocked 7900GT cards require 22A on a single 12V line implying they eat as much as 240W which is complete bull as most of us know.

Of course, I don't doubt that top of the line cards may and probably WILL require 100+W, but that's the extreme performance segment, which provides more performance that most will ever need and cost more than most will ever afford. I'm pretty sure mid-range cards (like 7900GT right now) will be reasonably power hungry and relatively easy to cool.

Even if not, all that means is I'll skip this generation too (I've already skipped two of them because my 6800GT is plenty powerful for me). No big deal. I like my games running smoothly, but not at the expense of noise. I'd rather buy a mid-range card and cool it semi-passively than go for a monster that's impossible to silence. Mid-range cards are very powerful right now anyway and can run most of the games at decent settings, unlike 18 months ago when there were no decent mid range card on the market.

Tzupy · Post by **Tzupy** » Tue Jun 06, 2006 7:30 am

I believe that ATi's next generation might come close to 200 W, if they go for the magic 1 GHz clock, maybe 300 W for dual GPU cards.
There will be a need for separate graphic card PSUs, but the ones currently available are using 40 mm fans, and are very noisy.
Maybe case makers should come with designs that can accomodate two PSUs (one bottom and one top), it would be a better solution IMO.

sgtpokey · Post by **sgtpokey** » Tue Jun 06, 2006 8:12 am

I'm not too worried about the insane 300w article.

Mainstream games will (IMHO) always be able to be run nicely using much less powerful components. This includes all the current talk about physics cards as well as dual gpu rigs.

Why? Because software game companies have to make sure their titles also play well for the notebook gamer crowd, which is a significant percentage of the total market. With pc game sales as they are today they can't afford to lock-out the notebook segment.

Suffice it to say the "performance-thin" notebook market will never have a 300w-derived gpu.

As such, I have no plans to "feed the monster" and buy dual gpus, ppu's or 300watt single gpus...

(I do hope this phase passes soon... I'm not a super-environmentalist but this strikes me as the same as people buying SUV's when they don't really need it [i.e. when the marginal benefit is outweighed by the steep power cost])

disphenoidal · Post by **disphenoidal** » Tue Jun 06, 2006 3:26 pm

This is ridiculous. While I doubt the 300W graphics cards will become the norm, I'm sure this will trigger waves and waves of people to go buy loud and innefficient 600+W power supplies manufacturers have told them they need. I thought today's power supplies were already overkill, I can't imagine the ones we'll be seeing soon.

And if people do start building 1000W systems, can you imagine how much energy will be wasted? Your PC will require as much power as your microwave oven!

Sgtpokey raises a good point though, the growing notebook market should help keep this in check.

Post by **Rusty075** » Tue Jun 06, 2006 4:10 pm

It sounds like after the next generation of cards (which are already past the point of no return) both of the big players are going to pull back on the wattages. They each saw what happened to Intel's marketshare when it lost sight of the wattage picture, and neither wants to let the other one put them in that position.

For high-end cards the dedicated PSU, either in the case in a 5.25" bay like the Corsair demo is just a stupid idea that will never really catch on. What makes more sense is to just use the existing technology of the laptop-style AC/DC brick with a plug right on the backplane of the card itself.

JazzJackRabbit · Post by **JazzJackRabbit** » Tue Jun 06, 2006 7:32 pm

Rusty075 wrote:For high-end cards the dedicated PSU, either in the case in a 5.25" bay like the Corsair demo is just a stupid idea that will never really catch on. What makes more sense is to just use the existing technology of the laptop-style AC/DC brick with a plug right on the backplane of the card itself.

3dfx tried that already, we all know how that ended...

autoboy · Post by **autoboy** » Tue Jun 06, 2006 9:13 pm

This must be a mistake. Maybe someone misheard them. Maybe they are saying that their next crossfire or SLI systems will use a full 300 watts. Thats 150 a card or 30W more than we have now. No way can a video card use 300 watts if a Prescott with a HUGE heatsink and lots of space can hardly keep cool. Good luck packing 2x the power into 2 PCI slots. I wanna see them try. What worries me now is that ATI wants you to buy three graphics cards for physics. Why? what is wrong with 2 or even 1? And why would i use another graphics engine based on parallel processing when physics is a series of related events. I can tell you this much. No matter how much they try, i'm only putting one graphics card in my machine. If they want to allow my onboard graphics to do some physics then i'm happy. Pretty much a free processor in the system sitting idle anyways. I would stick in a dedicated physics card though as long as it could be cooled passively.

Post by **Rusty075** » Tue Jun 06, 2006 10:18 pm

JazzJackRabbit wrote:3dfx tried that already, we all know how that ended...

Nah, 3dfx were just ahead of their time.

Compare the Voodoo 5 6000 to the current high-end and upcoming next generation of cards and look at what they have in common:

Huge power consumption (relative to the CPU)
Multiple GPU's in parallel
Multi-slot cooling systems
Supplemental power connectors
Cost in the neighborhood of $600

They just missed the market by about 6 years.

PPU's like the Aegia are probably a transitory phase. I don't think secondary PPU cards will ever catch on really. One of two things will happen: they won't show enough performance gains or there won't be enough game support and the concept will wither and die. Or the concept will show some legs, and NVidia and Ati will either build PPU's into new cores, or graft separate PPU chips on to their cards. Either way, I wouldn't buy stock in Aegia Inc. just yet. (or then again, their venture capitol backers are probably hoping that they'll just get bought by Ati or nVidia anyway)

autoboy · Post by **autoboy** » Sat Jun 10, 2006 8:50 pm

http://anandtech.com/tradeshows/showdoc ... =2775&p=12

Oh boy! I can't wait till my computer uses more power than my microwave oven. I bet the next thing Thermaltake comes out with is a handy little CD tray that you can warm up your chimichanga on.

Those fancy watercooled rigs are gonna have to stop using heater cores and start using the actual radiators.