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If we're to believe the pre-release hype, Fermi will be the fastest single-GPU videocard on the planet when it ships, leapfrogging ahead of ATI's HD 5870. But all that power is going to come at a cost, including a beefy 600W power supply, according to reports from CeBIT.
We've often seen inflated power supply requirements, as GPU vendors have to take into account lower quality units and how the all-important +12V rail distributes amps. But in this case, it looks like Nvidia's talking about a 600W PSU "with a minimum 12V current rating fo 42A," which would indicate a higher quality unit.
By comparison, AMD's dual-GPU 5970 requires a 650W power supply and is rated at 294W TDP. In single GPU territory, AMD's HD 5870 requires a 500W PSU, or 100W less than Fermi.
Comments are closed on this article
K0BALT
March 03, 2010 at 2:06pm
My whole overclocked system, (see below), is running on a Corsair 750W flawlessly. But, I am in the market to upgrade PSU's this week. The PC Power & Cooling 1200 is looking nice...
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i7 920@4.4GHz,Heatkiller 3.0, (2X)GTX295 Quad-SLI, EVGA X58 3X SLI, 6GB DDR3 OCZ Gold
LatiosXT
March 02, 2010 at 6:48pm
It's funny how something like this and people start cracking jokes. When a graphics card company throws out power supply requirements, it's just there to cover their asses and then some. What they assume is you have a high end machine with pretty much every port on the motherboard occupied with something of the sort, running at 100%. I've gotten away with installing a video card that required 450W on a 300W machine, because it was a bare minimum machine. For the so-called 550W requirement on the Radeon HD 5970, if http://extreme.outervision.com/PSUEngine is accurate and for a "bare minimum" Core i7-860, 4 sticks of RAM, a single hard drive, and something like a Antec 900 case, you need a 400W power supply, at the minimum (it says around 360W).
And to illustrate further, I used a Kill-A-Watt on my PC, which has a Core 2 Duo E8400, 4 sticks of RAM, three hard drives, a DVD drive, a GeForce 8800GT, a SB X-fi card,and some miscellaneous fixings... The system didn't pull more than 250W and I was benching Crysis. So realistically I could probably stick a Fermi into my machine and it'd still run just fine (I have a 500W PSU).
So if you want to use this as FUD, please kindly go outside and play in traffic.
Caboose
March 02, 2010 at 9:04pm
You know, those minimum requirements are there for a reason. Most people that have a fast and stable system, but suddenly start getting BSOD's or random crashes once they add a 2nd (or 3rd or 4th) card in to their system, is caused by an underpowered PSU.
Case in point. My previous rig had a 500w PSU. I was running a single ATI Radeon x1950 Pro. The minimum requirements for 2 x1950 Pro's in Crossfire was 550w. I picked up a 2nd card, and figured "ehh.. it's 50w. no big deal". Oh, how wrong I was. Everything ran just fine at idle, until I fired up FutureMark, Counter-Strike: Source, or Oblivion. BOOM! PC crashed! Why? I was drawing more power than my PSU could output causing the rest of the PC to have a lack of power and reboot.
So, good luck to you my good man, running a fully loaded Core 2 Duo system, with a single Fermi card on your 500w PSU.
Minimum hardware requirements are there for a reason, usually a good idea to follow them as the hardware manufacturer knows a bit more about their components than you do. ;)
Just a suggestion though. I mean who am I, with experience in this very situation as you described, to tell you what to do with your hardware.
-= I don't want to be dead, I want to be alive! Or... a cowboy! =-
DBsantos77
March 02, 2010 at 6:56pm
Please put a Fermi into your box and let us know how it goes.
-Santos
Gigabyte 785GX Micro Atx
AMD Phenom II 720 (Quad @ 3.6 Ghz 1.47v.)
6 GB DDR3 1333
Corsair 500w
Arctic Cooling Freezer Pro Rev.2
HIS HD 5850 @ 940/1175/1175v
500 GB
K0BALT
March 02, 2010 at 1:56pm
So my PowerWatt 300 won't be able to handle these in SLI???? darn.......
If this article is news to anyone, you should stick with onboard graphics.
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i7 920@4.4GHz,Heatkiller 3.0, (2X)GTX295 Quad-SLI, EVGA X58 3X SLI, 6GB DDR3 OCZ Gold
aviaggio
March 02, 2010 at 11:26am
LIES!! I really doubt a 600w PSU is going to be enough.
So what you're telling us is that in terms of power the Fermi will use just about the same as a 5970, but ultimately be slower. For the same price.
Yeah, that's what I thought.
JohnP
March 02, 2010 at 1:01pm
Article said that NVidia will be about 20% faster than stock 5870. A little O/C would eat that up in a hurry.
Neufeldt2002
March 02, 2010 at 10:35am
Driver site is down sort of, with entries for the 300 chip. However if you go to the beta drivers you can now download the latest driver with 300 support. Sorry if I posted info I wasn't supposed to.
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Caboose
March 02, 2010 at 10:29am
Next nVidia GPU will require it's own PSU. Which will be sold extra at an additional cost too!
-= I don't want to be dead, I want to be alive! Or... a cowboy! =-
Neufeldt2002
March 02, 2010 at 11:43am
I think it was the VooDoo 5 that when demo'ed it had an external PSU to power it.
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Neufeldt2002
March 02, 2010 at 9:46am
More and more, this chip is reminding me of the 6800 Ultra. Had one of them too, ran hot and sucked the power. I swear though that nVidia could slap a lawnmower engine on it, and people would still buy it. I really wish though that all this info would come in all at once. This piece here, piece there is really starting to get annoying. IMHO.
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Scootiep
March 02, 2010 at 9:38am
OHH, best idea ever, hook one up to a liquid cooling loop and use a hot tub as the reservoir! Get some waterproof input components and game in total style!
To start press any key...ohh, where's the "Any" key. - Homer Simpson
quickone
March 02, 2010 at 9:48am
Just fill the hot tub with mineral oil so you don't have to make anything waterproof. The surface area of the hottub should cool the liquid before it gets cycled back through so you wouldn't even need a radiator or coolant. Not sure about the specific heat though, its hard to beat water in its cooling capacity.
~~The difference between insanity and genius is merely succes~~
ryantmer
March 02, 2010 at 11:18am
But what if you want to be in the hot tub WITH your computer? Have you ever tried bathing in mineral oil? No fun at all! :)
CleverBullet
March 02, 2010 at 1:55pm
you would probably contaminate the oil and then it would be able to slightly conduc, that would be bad.
