No graphics card pulls 300W

THE REASON for this story is a somewhat massive push on some forums and web sites to get Nvidia'a G80 and DAAMIT's R600 GPUs placed in the 300-Watt category, which is absolute nonsense.

We got information and examples from several readers where whole threads contained a message that the GPU is a monster, consumes too much power and so on. While the price of progress is something we can choose to pay or not, giving out wrong information is just... wrong.

Now, the highest-end graphics boards can pull a maximum of 75 Watts from the motherboard via the PCIe x16 slot, and every 6-pin PEG power connector will yield additional 75 Watts. So, in case of 8800GTX and R600XTX, we are talking about 75+75+75 = 225, or a maximum of 225 Watts. This is the maximum amount of power that will be eaten and dissipated by an Nvidia G80 and AMD R600 based product.

No single 300W GPU is planned in the R600 vs. G80 wars. In fact, with 80nm and later 65nm process and further advances in video memory, you can expect a slight decrease in power consumption. Thermal specs for G85, R680 and R700 aren't yet available, but we got information that the thermal budget is 225W for at least a year. We also learned that at least one of the big two is preparing a complete power distribution revamp on the PCB and getting efficiency as close to 100% as possible.

In the end, it would not be fair if we would miss out on G80 and R600 real numbers, right? Well, since R600 boards aren't running on their shipping clocks, we cannot say what the number is, but the target is 50 Watts more than R580+ (X1950XTX). At the same time, the 8800GTS consumes around 10 Watts more than a 7900GTX, while 8800GTX consumes 40W more than 7900GTX. However, total number is more in 170-200W range than it is in 300W one. µ