ATI's R600 will consume over 250W

WE LEARNED that ATI's highly anticipated next GPU will consume up to an incredible 250 W to work. No wonder we reported on many occasions that the chip will be one of the hottest ever.

It is the 80 nanometre chip and we talked about it here saying a 65 nanometre chip is simply not possible for such a complex chip.

We also said that cards based on it will need a new "super doper" cooler, here.

And Charlie D has something to say, here.

We can now confirm that the new ATI card will consume around 250W. The currently fastest ATI, R580+ or Radeon X1950 XTX consumes up to 125W i a worst case scenario and heavy 3D while you can suck up 145W out with the dual chip X7950 GX2 card.

This means that the R600 will consume twice as much power, and probably will end up close to twice as warm but we also hear it will get much faster then the current cards with sixty four pipelines. It could easily end up twice as fast than the current ATI offerings.

It is now a January/February chip, so it will be a while until we have this baby on our desk but after a long time we are getting mildly titillated at the prospect. µ