It seems that cooling is everything as you guys know eVGA was one of the first to reveal water-cooled GTX 400 models last week then GTX 470/480 launchedwith the Hydro Copper waterblock based products.The... More...
Amazing Would love to see a G3D review of those babies, OC'd to the max. Just to see what Fermi can do with the right clocks
http://www.tweaktown.com/news/14698/nvidia_s_fermi_finds_a_new_use/index.html lol maybe it will turn fermi out of this to a proper card
woow this is nuts! if Hilbert could get this and overclock it like 20-30% i wouldnt be surprised if it went smoothly! PS: most probably the power consumption will skyrocket and c:
The problem is not Fermi + a h2O solution, but Fermi "needing" that solution to work properly as it should've done from the start. That boils down to a very expensive product. With that price, one can save a little more and buy a superior 5970, with the advantage of not having water in the case (I don't trust water there because of the future probable leaks, sorry... I worked helping my uncle who is a plumber some years ago and saw that water "always" slips through sooner or later). NASA developed a special water that hadn't any problems with electricity, but the price was a leg I suppose. Or even for what stock 480 costs, one can buy a 5870 and get a h2O solution for it (if any) and overclock it at pleasure.
Not exactly true unless you own a very decent H20 setup already. Then the extra cost would be just the block.
well GabrielSans what kind of temps are you getting on yours? is it crashing or throttling while gaming?tell us you expreance with the card if you would please
If you're one of those people saying: "If you don't have one 480, how do you know?", so, my answer is very simple: "Guru3d.com, Anandtech.com., Tomshardware.com, etc.". You know, reviewers test new hardware for us not to have to purchase all the stuff being released the whole time. On the other hand, if you ask about the temps of my 4870: Idle (49-55°C) and Load (~75°C). The fan is 40% at maximum under load (not even perceptible by my sensitive ears ). I never had to buy a special cooler solution to cool it down, friend. I am not a hardware engineer, but let me tell you this: With 3.2B transistors I would've gone multicore like CPU did when they got to the limits of speed vs temp. To serve us this huge core that is so crowded with transistors is like having my dual core at stock 2.66 GHz being served in the form of "one" core at stock 5.32 Ghz, and then selling me special cooling solutions for my high temps. I mean, if the technology to go multicores is not ready yet or it is very expensive, well, it is Nvidia's problem not ours. But the guys are smart enough to bring to the table an one core chip that is hugely crowded, hot and power hungry, and get all the money they can from their diehard fans base. That's not fair. They knew that these power/temps issues would happen. According to a review I could read tonight, the consumption can even reach the 300W under certain situations! Some people say that $500 is acceptable for a card of such a stature, but of course, that price is possible because Nvidia saved money not implementing a better engineering or cooling solution. Now, the poor diehard fans will end up with suns in their cases, lol. And SLI will be a dangerous adventure with stock cooling on air, of course. Absolutely unfair and crazy!
Well you're right about one thing... You're not a hardware engineer, we can tell. GTX 480 has 480 'cores' The power consumption does not reach 300W that's the maximum the 6+8 pin setup can give... Actually GTX 480 is estimated to consume around 225W~ at full load from reviews.
So, 480 cores... don't tell me! Are you kidding me, friend? I was speaking about cores in a different sense, like in the case of a CPU that is dual core, quad core, etc. Oh yes, maybe a GPU formed from two, four, six, etc. little GPU's is just my dream, but they'll have to find some solution in the future to keep the temps and watts at bay, you know. 225W in average, not the peak (let alone maximum): http://techpowerup.com/reviews/NVIDIA/GeForce_GTX_480_Fermi/30.html If those guys are wrong, sorry, it is not my fault.
Sorry about my ignorance, but having reached the limit of the equation speed vs temps, Nvidia will have to find a better solution to these problems. To keep adding transistors and reducing the space between them seems to be more and more problematic to them with all the issues with the yields and similar stuff. I said that about dual core for a GPU because it is something that my common sense thought of by comparing GPU's to CPU's, but yes, I am not an engineer in the end. Anyway, I'll never accept such hot cards in my case despite they can be good performers. They can fetch some other people to make money by selling grills, not me.