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In English
SuomeksiPower consumption and temperatures
Power consumption of the setup, minus the monitor
The downside of the high end hardware is always the power consumption. 9800GX2 with two GPUs is on a league of its own but the 240 cores of the GTX 280 do consume a lot more power than the older 8xxx generation. It is nice to see the idle rating of around 150 watts though. By using NVIDIA Hybrid Power technology and compatible motherboard the situation will only improve from here.
With limited room for a cooler, the higher power consumption usually leads to higher core temperatures. Even though the GTX280 is one of the largest graphic cards on the market, it still requires only two card slots. The idle temperature of 57 degrees celcius follows the same curve with the power consumption against the 8xxx cards. The load temperature of the chips rices to 79 °C, which isn't really that alarming. GPUs are designed to withstand high temperatures so as long as you don't get any graphical errors or crashing, you're good to go.
Noise-wise the new GTX 280 falls in the category of average. It's about as noisy as the stock cooler of the 8800GTS, not really disturbingly loud.
Conclusion
What can I say... the parallel processing and PhysX on the GPU are the things that make this product so great. Yes, it is a fast card when it comes to graphics but the real revolution is somewhere else. It is easy to see how for example Folding@home, video transcoding, medical imaging and even playing with Photoshop can benefit from this move from NVIDIA. I believe we are seeing the greatest change in computer technology for years. I'm not sure if this move can be compared to anything that has happened before... Commodore 64, Amiga, Atari ST had separate chips for handling raw calculations, sound and graphics. PC put them inside a single chip. We now have taken the sound and graphics away from the CPU and now we are finally taking away the raw calculations too? I have to talk about the price... GTX 280 is very expensive piece of kit. Compare it to what ATI/AMD have to offer and the scale start to tip towards them. Too bad that we didn't have any cards from them to be tested but from what I've seen from other hardware sites, NVIDIA might be pushing too hard with this product. Time will tell how the things will balance out but things are not looking as bright as they used to for NVIDIA. XFX made a great product even better by stepping up the clock speeds. They do offer the same card with three different variations - Standard, XT and XXX. They also have the slightly slower GTX 260 available but when it comes to need for power, the choice is clear. |
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