sabot00 :
In the article they said Fermi used 300W, 2 x 8-pins, the 5970 is a dual GPU card, it's like comparing the 5870 to a GTX 295.
You wonder why the 5870 uses less power, however 1 Fermi uses as much as 2 Cypress.
How long will it take to scale Fermi to replace GTS 250's? 9800GT? GT 240?
nVidia will take significantly longer, perhaps a year or more to touch the budget segment.
Fermi uses 225W, 8+6pin, it CAN go up to 300W if you wish to overvolt the card and OC it hardcore. A 5970 uses 294W max 8+8pinwithout overclocking, and 400W max if you overvolt it to OC it. So no, 1 Fermi doesn't use anywhere near 2 Cypress chips in power. It's definitely more than 1 Cypress, but considering it's size and estimated performance by some, it is just as efficient as the Cypress likely.
JAYDEEJOHN :
"It is less than the power consumption of a 5970 which has a regular 294 watt max, so why wasn't everyone running for the hills when we heard the 5970 could max out at 400watts with an 8+8pin connection for overclocking??"
First of all, this is rumored, as I said, and secondly, its hinting at needing specail cases and cooling for duo cards, like the 5970 is, but without the special cooling, tho the cases do require certain dimensions.
I think the main point here is, its not any more power efficient than ATIs solution, and possibly less so, considering the dual core loss of scaling vs single chip.
Ahh, fair enough. Thought you were pulling another "the sky is falling" trip like some people on here are.
As for power efficiency, we don't know if it is better or worse than ATI's solutions, it could be better, could be worse. Saying it uses more power so it must be worse is a horrible misnomer. The chip is bigger, so it obviously uses more power to give more performance. If nVidia makes the chip very power efficient, it could give off practically no heat at all (obviously it wont be that efficient, but theoretically it could be, the cards are bound to have plenty of bloody real estate to make it so
😛). I'm guessing it will be on par with the efficiency of the 5970 though, but that would mean it is unlikely to require special cooling for tri-SLI.... quad-SLI probably would need some though. If the Fermi is far more efficient, which given nVidia's track record I doubt, then you might be able to pull off quad-SLI with no special cooling, but again I doubt that seriously.
1898 :
Seems like all the rumours (apart from those obvious fake graphs) are becoming true.
Expensive, hot, noisy, power hungry and not really much faster.
Except we don't know if any of them are true...... any info on that right now is just as fake as those graphs, aside from the power usage. But we already knew it would use a lot of power for such a huge chip, how EFFICIENT it is with that power is what matters... not how much it uses. Expensive... probably, you pay a premium for performance, and it probably WILL perform because that is how nVidia builds cards, and if it doesn't then nVidia would be stupid to release anything at all. Hot and noisy, you have no idea and neither do I, nor does anyone else on these forums or the internet, so stop spreading rumours >.<