It's not just about the cooler. How much heat it dumps in the case and how much heat is generated in the PSU due to load are both very important considerations for a quiet system.
Total wattage is only a small piece of the picture. 12V rails are the first spec to look at these days. But I agree, 350 W should be fine. You'll just need a 500W PSU anyway for the connectors. (edit)More importantly, it's hard to find a 350 W PSU with sufficient 12V capacity.

True, but according to Gibbo (taken with a large dosage of salt) AMD told him the R600 draws about 200 watts in normal operation and about 225ish when overclocked. Again taken with a large grain of salt. He could just be saying that to drum up demand for R600 in preparation of being able to sell them.

So, is another 20-30 watts over and above an 8800 GTX going to suddenly cause a powersupply to heat up much more with a R600 vs. a G80?

And as far as I can tell, most of the heat is vented out the back of the case. Although the memory chips on the back of the card would dump some into the case.

And anyone looking for a truly silent HTPC isn't really going to be using an HD 2900 XT or a 8800 GTX anyways. Myself I'm looking at either a passively cooled 8500 from Nvidia or a passively cooled RV610 from ATI for my HTPC. Depending on which one handles HD video decoding better (H.264 AND VC-1).

Regards,
SB

I just wonder if/when R600 comes and it really needs these rumoured 225W ...
will all the people who wrote again and again that "theinq" and "Fudo" were writing FUD about how power hungry the card is ("220W? no way!"), will these people write that they were wrong?

Sheeesh, now the fact that XT with 512MB can need 225W is almost officially confirmed... I don't wanna touch the XTX ground and imagine how much it may need.

No doubt R600 is a beast in a kind. Hopefully in no way it will be associated with P4 the "Presshot" :P

I was thinking compared to the GTS. But then again, we don't know much about performance yet. It could be a worthwhile tradeoff for most.

I'm not looking for a dedicated HTPC at all, I use my gaming system for movies. Since ATI uses a smaller process, I was hoping they would improve on NVidia's already decent energy efficiency. It looks like I'll be waiting quite a while for a card to play Crysis. But that's OK, no hurry.

True, I probably should have compared it to a GTS 640 since it appears to be closest to that in DX9 games. Although with all the FUD flying around the web at the moment, I'm not pinning it down at anything until proper reviews come out.

I'm wondering if it'll be possible to truly compare apples to apples anymore as it appears Nvidia and ATI now have different AA seetings. I'm sure the standard 4xMSAA will still be around, but that's rather boring when you have these other hybrid AA settings.

Regards,
SB

Without any real proof or anything, the max capacity of XT's default cooler is 210W (aka what it can still cool), so it means that even with overdrive OC, it won't go over that.

Not all the power supplied to the card goes to heat, some of it has to used to some work :wink:

Which fits in quite well with the 200 watts under full load at default clocks that Gibbo is saying.

I'd imagine hardcore o/c'rs will will probably replace the default cooler anyways.

I'll still hold judgement until some actual reviews show up. At this point it's anyone's guess what is BS and what is correct out there.

Regards,
SB

PS - I bet noone can guess I'm sitting at home bored. ;)

Which work?

The only "work" is the fan rotation which isn't much compared to the total power a GPU eats up.

A GPU isn't a mechanical part and the efficiency formula you refer to applies only to this. The power has to be distributed between the GPU itself, the memory, the VRMs and the remaining components of the board, just like an R580 itself never eats more than something like 60watt according to ATITool/RivaTuner, although this doesn't include memory controllers' supply voltage.

wow, I can't believe people skipped right over what Vertex shader posted.

Wizzard @ techpowerup.com has a 1ghz R600 card. The qustion is, is it a OC, or stock? Because if that is a OC, then that is one danm fine OC. 250w is most impressive.

http://i21.photobucket.com/albums/b2...e737/tool2.gif
http://i21.photobucket.com/albums/b2...e737/tool1.gif


http://www.techpowerup.com/?30555

CJ: "Just got word that the HIS HD2900XT will run at 750Mhz core and 850Mhz mem."

Then that is a one danm fine OC.

What if it's the XTX?

:runaway:

Well it's one of 3 possibilities:

1) Stock XTX
2) OC'd XTX
3) OC'd XT

If it were #1 or #3, :-D. Anyway, we'll know in 2 weeks.

Well obviously it is an overclocked score. Sampsa says: "Actually there is already news about R600 overclocking".

http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/...1&postcount=18

Whether this is an XT or XTX, and under what conditions he was able to achieve the overclock, who knows. But clearly that is not stock clock speed.

I'm hoping it's an aircooled XT. ;)

Realistically though it's probably LN or some other form of exotic cooling.

If the stock XTX is at 1GHz stock, which is more than 600GFlops peak processing power, next step will be the Tflop in a chip war.

The GPU and memory arn't mechincal parts, but where is the heat coming from? Electricity converted to heat is coming from somewhere, if the cooler can dissipate up to 210watts of heat, the card if supplied 200 watts, all that wattage isn't going to be turned to heat, the card is doing something when the computer is on right?

edit: And that somewhere is resistance.

Ok, I asked wizz if that is a OC, and if yes, with stock cooling. And if it was a XT or XTX. I doubt he can answer that though...

:roll:

If that is a OC'ed XT on on stock cooling, I'm going to go crazy.

That's electrons displacement, 100% of the power a GPU eats up has to be considered as following Ohm's law as there is no "visible" work.

Data processing itself can't be considered as work as there is no moving part.

Whether it's an OC'd XT or XTX, 1Ghz core clock with stock cooling is :shock:. That represents a 33% increase over stock XT core speeds as far as we know. That's absolutely phenomenal; better than anything we've seen in the land of OC'ing in the last few generations.

Alright I used the wrong word :wink: what would you like to use other then work?

I believe what he's saying is that all electricity consumed by the video card (other than the fan) is converted to heat in the process of crunching data.

Regards,
SB