According to Drew Henry (NVIDIA’s GeForce General Manager), the GF100 is designed to run at high temperature. It’s the result of a tradeoff as he says in NVIDIA’s blog about GTX 480 power and heat:
We wanted to let you know that we’ve also heard your concerns about GTX 480 with respect to power and heat. When you build a high performance GPU like the GTX 480 it will consume a lot of power to enable the performance and features I listed above. It was a tradeoff for us, but we wanted it to be fast. The chip is designed to run at high temperature so there is no effect on quality or longevity. We think the tradeoff is right.
So what, try remove the fans then cook an egg on that grill or make coffee am sure that you can do that.
Yes I can understand this tradeoff, but if you have 120W higher power consumption than the competition which is about 70% more, for a 15% more performance (5870 vs 480), that is one fucked up tradeoff.
Not to mention the 27W idle power consumption of the 5870 compared to 70W of the 480. Thats 260% more power consumption.
It wasn’t about quality, I know NV or AMD won’t make a product that lasts 6 months coz of heat and they know that… the problem is with all this power requirement and heat outputs all parts inside the PC will be affected, and no body likes this… don’t even say make some nice cooling or add liquid cooling, at $500 and for this non-big advantage over HD 5870, and all the heat and you want me to buy another PSU or another colling thigies ? okay just lower the price to 200 and I’ll invest the rest of 300 in cooling and power !!
More importantly PTX 2.0 is (finaly) out!
http://developer.download.nvidia.com/compute/cuda/3_0/toolkit/docs/ptx_isa_2.0.pdf
What Psolord said…
Also, even being an nvidia fan, i call this ‘explanation’ from nvidia BS. o_O Yes, yes, high performance stuff requires extreme cooling and stuff (just take a look at some rack-based servers), but come on, this is meant to be for home users… Or do i need a separate room in my house for the two gaming PCs we have to provide optimal cooling and acceptable sound levels? (Water cooling is not so popular – for a reason…)
Oh guys, come on.
You know that NVidia tries to get into a market which is NOT the gaming market, thus costing them a lot more silicon, resulting in this heat/energy issue.
I am not a NVidia fanboy and ATI neither.(I have owned both)
I don’t really care… if you are a gamer ATI is the way to go in term of cost/perf in this current generation.
But it is obvious that the technical choice they made for the HPC market is putting them in a bad situation against their current 95% consumer base (= graphics/games) to please more the current 5%.
(which may drastically change in the next 3/5 years)
But for a computer (as is TO COMPUTE) and architecture enthusiast, I am must admit that they are doing a good stunt here.
Of course, NVidia PR is not going to say they are not the most efficient(perf vs energy) for gaming, there is no point in doing that now. What do you expect…?