In laptops I'd agree and that's why I bought a Maxwell. Power efficiency is not the top priority of enthusiasts who will generally buy desktops. We care about performance.
If you guys care about 10% more power in the same thermal envelope that's your opinion. I'm cheap but I'll splurge on good hardware if it gives me noticeable performance.
Try OCing a 290 on air and see how it feels.idd it is
(Hawaii vs GK-110)
100W from smaller cheap will lead to higher temps for two reasons:
- heat capacity of bigger chip is bigger than heat capacity of smaller chip, leading to smaller temp delta
- bigger die area means better conductivity, means easier to cool
GPUs are created for mobile first and scaled upwards for mobile, data center, corporate use, all the way up to servers.
yeah... I've actually never met on forums ANYONE who makes his purchase based on 10% power difference, 30 W whatever...
and yet time and again I have to hear about "you guys who care about power so much".
I mean WHO ARE THESE PEOPLE you are arguing with?
For the umptieth time - it's not about 30W of power bill.
It's about who has more power efficient arch, it's about engineering excellence and it's about those 30W potentially deciding high-end perf. and mobile winner.
Actually, 10-30W can make a difference to OEMs. But it probably doesn't matter to a typical desktop user. 10% power doesn't mean jack for the desktop. Yeah. This is obvious. However, one has to consider the big picture.
People saying that 20-30W doesn't mean anything for desktops don't really get what's going on.
You are simply ignoring the facts. Tahiti was not designed up from the smaller Pitcairn chip.
So the boxes are not printed yet?
....then I don't believe these cards will be called R9 285X.
Same number of stream processors as R9 280X, but significantly narrower memory bus?
I'll bet it gets called R9 275X or something else instead.
You're the one in the wrong here, Tahiti was a part of GCN 1.0 and it certainly scaled from the bottom up, as all of those parts use the same design technology. It wasn't apparent at retail but all of these parts use the same tech, from the mobile dGPUs to the high end dGPUs for desktops.
The difference is, AMD applies different codenames to each and every single part in their respective performance category - the low/mid range was pitcairn, the high performance category was Tahiti and Tahiti pro. NV does not share this name convention, everything is Kepler. Each and every Kepler part is a Kepler part, from the GK106 to the GK110.. But AMD's GCN 1.0 does have a different name depending on what performance category it targets (for the desktop at least). But AMD has the same GCN 1.0 tech in every single one of those parts, and the differences are related to clockspeeds, memory, bus width, shader counts, etc. They are all GCN 1.0 designs from AMD. They are all using the same tech. Just like while GK107 is a far cry from the performance of GK110, it IS THE SAME tech. Even a cheesy GT640, while being pretty bad performance wise, shares the same tech as does the 780ti. But NV doesn't apply different names to different performance segments - they just code name the chip with GKxxx. AMD uses actual code names depending on the performance category.
When Silverforce first showed up on these forums, it was his #1 argument against Fermi. Of course that tune changed over time... but there you go, you've now met someone who at least used to use that as an excuse.
But seriously, I do care about power consumption. I'm running an SFF build with a 450 watt GPU. I don't overvolt my GPU, but I will overclock. And that said, GK110 has so much more headroom without breaking the power bank than Tahiti has. Which is why I got a gtx780.
I just explained this. Cape verde, and pitcairn are all GCN 1.0 based designs and share the same tech. Differences? Very minor, with the most obvious differences being the number of compute engines, shader engines, rasterizers, steam processors or CUDA cores, all scaling up and down. You can add or remove, you can go up or down in TDP based on the same GCN 1.0 tech or the Kepler tech. GK107 has a bunch of stuff removed just like cape verde has a bunch of stuff removed. I already explained that AMD applies codenames to each performance segment, while NV does not do this. Kepler is Kepler. GCN 1.0 is pitcairn and tahiti. GCN 1.0 scales from the bottom up. You go ahead and think what you will though and ignore it. Keep thinking that efficiency doesn't matter to AMD. IMO, the fact that they haven't sold many mobile dGPUs in a while probably was their main motivation behind updating their architecture with Tonga.
Performance per watt is the new metric for all silicon. Anyone who thinks otherwise doesn't get the bigger picture, period.... because nearly everything in the PC world is designed as scalable architectures. Haswell is designed like this, GCN 1.0 is designed like this, and Kepler/Maxwell are designed like this. These designs can in the small ultrabooks all the way up to enterprise professional cards with intel, AMD and NV adding and removing from the architecture (in terms of engines, clockspeeds, cores, etc) as they wish to fit their TDP or form factor goal.
Techhog and Blackened23, this will be your final warning. The arguments stop right after my post. Agree to disagree and move on.
-Rvenger
No, it never changed. I still hate cards that are terribly inefficient compared to the competition, and the power bill does factor in the final price.
Fermi (GTX480) was horrible compared to the 5870, it literally doubled the power (I still cringe seeing Guru3d or AT's Crysis power load for it!) for 10-15% the performance gained.
Now with the R290/X situation, a custom cooled card not running at 94C, as have been shown by many sites, uses very close to the GTX780/ti in power. They only become inefficient when OC with vcore. That's the drawback of a high density smaller die approach, more vcore with those transistors crammed in, leads to more leakage.
Price-wise, at the time and even now, where I was (Europe & later moved to Australia), custom R290s are ~$150 cheaper than 780, and R290X was ~$250 cheaper than 780Ti. It wasn't even a fair comparison, as someone who values perf/$ as well as perf/w, R290s was the clear winner.
Power always matters, but it needs to be taken into context. What is the market? High end, power matters less, and often doesn't matter at all IF the performance is great enough. But sure, mobiles, perf/w is #1, there's no denying that.
ps. I pay ~30 USD cents per kWh. Power matters. This is also why I undervolt my CF R290, and its running at <60C, each of them draw ~200W.. under MINING load.
yeah... I've actually never met on forums ANYONE who makes his purchase based on 10% power difference, 30 W whatever...
and yet time and again I have to hear about "you guys who care about power so much".
I mean WHO ARE THESE PEOPLE you are arguing with?
For the umptieth time - it's not about 30W of power bill.
It's about who has more power efficient arch, it's about engineering excellence and it's about those 30W potentially deciding high-end perf. and mobile winner.
Being in the market for something new, this is good to know!! I've had my eye on the R9-290 for its great value, but worried about high heat and noise... a slight under-volt and NO overclocking might make it run cool & quiet even after a day of gaming, then? Nice!
Just buy one with an effective cooler. :\