KayDat wrote:The 6870 sits between the 5870 and 5850, so it actually performs better than the 5850.
The edge is there but slight, and according to most reviews goes hand in hand with an increase in power used. They are quite comparable. But how can you possibly think it is relevant to say "
die shrinks actually result is lower power consumption and therefore less heat" right after saying "
Power draw is similar to the 5850"?? I know that die shrinks generally lower power, but like you just said in the same bloody sentence, the 6870's power draw is similar to the 5850's. in this case it
did not result in lower power, so it's irrelevant to the question at hand to say that it usually does. I am asking about a particular, atypical situation where a die shrink does not result in lower power, as with the 6870 vs 5850.
Power draw is basically the same (though most reviews show the 6870 actually draws more). The 6870, which is smaller, nevertheless uses the same amount of power (due to higher frequencies or whatever). Therefore it uses more power per square millimeter. It is using the same amount of power (crammed into a smaller area), and has a smaller area for heat transfer. Is there any reason to think it won't get hotter, given an equivalent cooling solution?
Modo wrote:The performance per watt is better
That's not actually the case: see
http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/HIS/ ... 70/30.html
The new GPU runs hotter because AMD used less efficient heatsinks on the reference cards ... if you want coll & quiet, you need to look for non-reference heatsinks.
That really doesn't have anything to do with what I asked. Yes, better cooler will help, but that goes for both the 5850 and 6870. My question has nothing to do with coolers, I am talking about a fundamental property of the chip. In short, from what I can see, the same cooler on both means the 5850 will not run as hot since it is dissipating its heat through a larger surface area. Is there any reason to think this would not be the case?