Nvidia mystery 'thermal analysis' explained

A FEW MONTHS ago, Nvidia mass mailed OEMs asking for their chassis to be sent in for 'thermal analysis'. What that meant, or why it did it remained a mystery until a little bird gave me the last remaining piece of the puzzle.

Let's backpedal a bit. If you have been following the G92 vs RV670 soap opera, you will know that the initial leaked numbers showed that ATI was going to pip Nvidia by a few points in the benchmark 3DMark06 benchmark. While I should say benchmark again, I won't, I will just say that early odds had ATI leading by about 10 per cent.

When the cards came out, Nvidia was in the lead by about 10 per cent, more or less, depending on applications, but by about as much as it was tipped to lose by in the early days. How did it get the 20 per cent? Remember our friend the 'thermal analysis'?

It seems that Nvidia took a much lower clocked G92 and cranked it to the edge of living with its single slot cooling "solution". It had to validate it against every chassis it could to crank it to the point of errors, then dial it back by the barest minimum.

So, it looks to have worked on the outside. A quick poll of OEMs shows that in their testing, there is little to no thermal margin for the 8800GT in a one slot configuration. Remember boys and girls, this vents heat inside the chassis, not directly outside like a two slot card.

The fact that it pulled 20 per cent out of the bag is pretty good engineering, but also pretty poor marketing. If you think about it, what is the margin between the current 8800GT and a GTX? Pretty small, most places say about 15 per cent overall. Now if you add in about a 50 per cent price difference, things get a little uncomfortable for the higher price and higher margin cards.

A quick look at Newegg shows that all nine variants of the GT are out of stock. This says they are popular and in short supply, both conclusions are backed up by data from other sources. So how do you prevent people from buying two 8800GTs and SLIing them, beating an Ultra and pocketing the difference themselves? What about three GTs in one of the newer boards?

Nvidia took the easy routes out and vastly limited GT supply, we have heard 20K and 40K boards for the non-denominational winter festivities season (NDWFS). If you want three, you have to go with the GTX or Ultra, or go ATI.

In the end, Nvidia appears to have won the immediate battle, but quite possibly lost the war. Sales numbers for the NDWFS will tell some of the story, but the real number to try and find is how many GTX sales vanish in light of the GT. At least you now know why the gap is so small, and what the mystery 'thermal analysis' was about. µ