ATI WON QUITE a lot of OEM designs recently, and the reason for that is thermal characteristics of the products that are about to come out.

First, the R600 die-shrink with a lot of changes inside is eating than 100W less than the previous part. Now it seems all the chipsets the company is planning to launch during this quarter will consume ever-dwindling amounts of power. This includes both 790FX, the high-end part and 780G, the part with integrated graphics.

While Nvidia also cut graphics power consumption by an impressive amount of watts, looking at the chipset side paints a dire image.

Nvidia's C72 and MCP72 come with king-size coolers, over 5cm in height - it has to dissipate 48W

In a battle of high-end chipsets - the Nforce 780 versus 790FX - it will be interesting to see how the MCP+BR04 (48W TDP) battles against the RD790 NorthBridge. This eats only 8W and is a native PCIe 2.0 chip. This is a 40W difference And even when Southbridge chips are calculated, ATI's own RD790+SB600 (later SB700) combination is a winner for low-power systems.

This small thing left of CPU cooler, below Digital PWM (Nvidia still uses old analogue 4/8-Phase voltage regulation) is an 8W TDP chip - the RD790 Northbridge

It seems that implementing PCIe Gen2 and HyperTransport 3 in combination with TSMC advanced manufacturing process yielded better-than-expected thermals, while Nvidia and Intel both face the challenge of cooling hot products such as X38 and nForce 700 series.

While heat-pipes are now touted as best thing since sliced bread, for AMD chipsets - using a BTX-style case is a hard reality, which is ideal for keeping those graphics cards running all nice and clean.

There is some interesting news coming in TriFire vs. 3-Way SLI, and we'll address that in a separate article, coming right up. µ