jimmysmitty :
The card has no fans but they are designed to go into a server rack which has fans spinning at full speed pushing air through the heatsinks out the back. Even right now with the door closed I can hear my servers spinning in my office.
The design is probably due to the way servers are built. I doubt you could throw a V100 into a mid tower or full tower and run it like in a server chassis without running into thermal problems.
Yeah, I think that's what Paul was saying, and I agree. Nvidia specifies how much CFM (or m^3 / sec) are required for their passively-cooled Tesla cards.
It's not just Nvidia, either. AMD makes passively-cooled server cards, as did Intel, when they offered Xeon Phi on a PCIe card.
jimmysmitty :
Most GPUs start off as HPC based chips that get slowly trickled down to consumer ends after being cut off.
That's twisting it, somewhat. I don't think it's really true to say it's a server chip before gaming, or vice versa. The past few generations have had the consumer cards released (or, in this case, simply announced) first. But Nvidia obviously collects requirements for each new chip. Some of those are for server applications, while others are for gaming and workstation uses. Then, all their chips (except for GP100 and GV100) are built to fill niches in all of these markets and sold on the appropriate vehicle (Tesla, for server; Quadro, for workstation; GeForce for consumer).
jimmysmitty :
Its the same with CPUs. Most CPUs have a server variant that cost quite a bit more than the desktop counterpart does.
No, not in the same way as Nvidia is doing with GPUs. Intel's actual server chips are LGA 3647, and use different silicon than their workstation or desktop chips. AMD happened to use the same Zepplin die, in first gen Ryzen, Threadripper, and Epyc. But that's a first, for them, and I'm not sure if the dies from Epyc 7 nm will trickle down to desktop, or if they are going to bifurcate their silicon.