A video card that requires 270 watts of power?

[astro]

My God! :eek: I thought electronics were supposed to be getting more power efficient.

We already know that this little monster hums along at quite a clip, but how does it look? Monstrous, of course. Those of you hoping to get off easy with the case size and power supply requirements are going to have to think again, ATI’s R600 tops out at a record-busting 12.4-inches in length. ATI will have two SKUs of the R600 at launch, the XTX which features 1GB of DDR4 RAM and the R600XT with a mere 512MB of GDDR3 – weak sauce, we know. The XTX version comes in retail and OEM versions and it’s the OEM one (pictured) that really gets outlandish, with the 12.4-inch length and 270W of power consumption. The retail XTX cuts it down to 9.5-inches and 240W, while the weaker XT matches those specs. A little bit down the road, ATI will follow these up with the R600XL which will be cheaper and hopefully less demanding. Just for a frame of reference: NVIDIA’s 8800 GTX was deemed outlandish with its longest-ever 10.4-inch length and beefy 165W power requirement. How much bigger are these things going to get? Oh, that’s right, once they get outside our PCs there just won’t be any stopping 'em.

[Mindfield]

Yeesh. And I thought my former 7800GTX SLI setup was power-hungry. The 7950GX2 I have right now isn’t quite as bad) Are they going to offer crossfire on the XTX? It would need its own 600W Power Supply then…

[Rysto]

@astro

My God! :eek: I thought electronics were supposed to be getting more power efficient.

Rather the opposite, really. As transistors get smaller they waste more electricity. And I believe that Moore’s Law also applies to components like video cards, which means that every 18 months, the number of transitors in a new video card doubles. So, each individual transitor is getting less efficient, and the number of transistors in growing exponentially, which leads to such ridiculous power requirements.

CPUs, incidentally, have reached the point where Intel et al. can’t make them faster, because the power requirements(and the heat generated from all of that power) is too high.

[gotpasswords]

@Rysto

CPUs, incidentally, have reached the point where Intel et al. can’t make them faster, because the power requirements(and the heat generated from all of that power) is too high.

Just yesterday, Intel revealed their Teraflops Research Chip, which will put a teraflop on your desktop and only consumes 62 watts, which is the same as a 2.4 GHz Pentium Core2 Duo or AMD Athlon 2200+