The Fermi Thread - Part 3

[Sn0wm@n]

Just when you thought your 850W PSU was enough for your stock PC:


It gets worse:


Power consumption figures in benchmarks can sometimes be quite revealing:
Its probable that the 5870 isn't using a good portion of its resources in Unengine Heaven.
Whether its poor driver optimization or design limitation is unknown.

Surely with crazy high power output, the GTX480 is being used 100% by driver!?
Its very possible, like i7/Phenom, that typical scenarios use much less power than special case (recall how AMD advertised "typical" not "max" Phenom power)
nVidia might then purposefully slows down shader execution in Fermi in these special non-game scenarios to ensure advertised 250W spec.

*censored* ...... wow..... seriously 850watt for sli 480gtx ??? how much watt does the mobo and cpu get into those figures????

[zerazax]

*censored* ...... wow..... seriously 850watt for sli 480gtx ??? how much watt does the mobo and cpu get into those figures????

Well you can subtract 851-479 = 372W more for the extra card, assuming nothing else was changed. That's at the wall of course... taking a 0.85 efficiency, that's 316W (at 0.80 efficiency, its 298W). So either way, the cards are drawing WAY over the 250W Nvidia advertised.

Holy moly!

[purefun65]

Well you can subtract 851-479 = 372W more for the extra card, assuming nothing else was changed. That's at the wall of course... taking a 0.85 efficiency, that's 316W (at 0.80 efficiency, its 298W). So either way, the cards are drawing WAY over the 250W Nvidia advertised.

Holy moly!

give or take that can be a fair assumption.

[highoctane]

Well you can subtract 851-479 = 372W more for the extra card, assuming nothing else was changed. That's at the wall of course... taking a 0.85 efficiency, that's 316W (at 0.80 efficiency, its 298W). So either way, the cards are drawing WAY over the 250W Nvidia advertised.

Holy moly!

Kind of an eye opener thats for sure, too bad TSMC doesn't have a high-k metal gate process on 40nm, 28nm should be high-k metal gate or at least be an option with TSMC later this year.

I'm wondering how much of a role leakage may be contributing with the high transistor count.

[***Deimos***]

Kind of an eye opener thats for sure, too bad TSMC doesn't have a high-k metal gate process on 40nm, 28nm should be high-k metal gate or at least be an option with TSMC later this year.

I'm wondering how much of a role leakage may be contributing with the high transistor count.

TMSC 40nm is NOT the problem. Somehow magically AMD made a DUAL-GPU card with less power and lower idle power.

Last time I checked, 5970=4BT. GTX=3BT. 4>3 isn't it?

The problem is the design. AMD put a LOT of focus on maintaining 4870's very high performance/TDP. nVidia was focused on top performance irregardless of means.

Its exactly the same way P4 fell from grace at 3.8Ghz.

(this is why Intel doesn't just hope for 1%performance/1%power, but requires it and much higher)
Now, where are all those Dual-Fermi folks? or the Fermi laptop weirdos.. I wanna see them spin their way out.

Nvidia partners prolly going nerdrage right now for this massive fail, after waiting so long for this...

Who wants to be the first to offer 5 year warranty.. anybody? What about 3 year? Any takers? EVGA? BFG? They will provide SOME warranty (and house fire insurance), right?

Radeon HD 5870’s 27W idle board rating, achieved in part by clocking its GPU down to 157 MHz and its GDDR5 memory to 300 MHz. Nvidia goes even further, dropping clocks to 50 MHz core, 67 MHz memory (270 MT/s data rate), and 100 MHz for the shaders. Nvidia doesn’t cite its idle board power, but an educated guess would still put the GeForce GTX 480 around 60W at those frequencies

idle	core	mem	shader	power
5870	157	300	157	27
480	50	67	100	60!?

[highoctane]

Who wants to be the first to offer 5 year warranty.. anybody? What about 3 year? Any takers? EVGA? BFG? They will provide SOME warranty (and house fire insurance), right?

Not sure about the others but PNY offers a lifetime warranty with registration.

http://www3.pny.com/GTX-470-1280MB-PCIe-P2876C434.aspx
http://www3.pny.com/GTX-480-1536MB-PCIe-P2877C434.aspx

EDIT: EVGA offers lifetime was well with registration.

[***Deimos***]

*censored* ...... wow..... seriously 850watt for sli 480gtx ??? how much watt does the mobo and cpu get into those figures????

Around 150W for everything in the system except video cards.
This is based on the total power output of 57xx and 58xx.
+/- maybe 20W.

Thus, the two 480s are sharing 700W between each other. Maybe 20-40W for error and another 20W for extra power of SLI chipset... that's still 640W!

Its impossible to justify how the system could possibly use 350W, given advertised 250Wx2.

The system by itself can't use more than 226W which already included a 5750.
850W probably because EVERYTHING - PSU, CPU, DRAM, HDD, and ofcourse 480s - are LESS EFFICIENT because of VERY HIGH TEMPS caused by the 480s. I would never store critical data on hard drives in there.

147W?

Nah, it seems to be ~100W or so across the various reviews

yes GTX480 is about 100W (45%) more than 5870.
The only card worse in perf/Watt is the GTX295.. sorry GTX480 #2 place.