321–330 of 526 posts
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"3rD party connectors" is being waved around by armchair critics. The connectors on the receiving end of all of this aren't some cheap knock-off, they are from a reputable manufacturer and probably exceed the baseline.
No sane individual is going to buy 5090 for $2000-100000 and hook it up to a $15 Power supply.
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A higher input voltage may eventually be used but a standard PC power supply only has 12V and lower (5V and 3.3V) available, so they'd need to use a new type of power supply or an external power supply, both of which are tough sells. On the other hand, the voltages used inside a GPU are around 1V, and a higher input voltage introduces lower efficiency in the local conversion. 12V is only really used because historica…
Lower voltage would be OK, but then all of the cables and plugs would need to be redesigned. And there would still need to be for voltage switching unless we start adding a protocol and have PSU switch voltage dynamically... which is also not efficient. Since they went so far to create a new cable which wont be available on old PSU they would have easily extended that slightly and introduced an entirely new PSU class…
It's not like that. It's a design where PSU only provides 12V to motherboard and motherboard provides the rest. Only location of those connectors change. It's called ATX12VO.
In modern PC almost nothing draws from 3v3 rail, not even RAM. I'm pretty sure nothing draws 3v3 directly from PSU at all today.
5v rail directly from PSU only used for SATA drives.
What’s wild is that this is a company clearly capable of designing highly complex things with numerous tradeoffs, challenges and unknowns. And then the fuckin cable is the issue. Repeatedly.
Reminds me a bit of BMWs and their infamous and persistent coolant pump woes. The running joke in those circles is "replacing the entire cooling system" counts as "basic, regular maintenance". BMW makes a fantastic engine, then makes the water pump impeller out of plastic. For what feels like decades.
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This is because they are trying to parallel like 50amps (it's 12 volt IIRC) over a few conductors to get to 600watts. If it becomes unbalanced due to any number of reasons, none of those individual cables can come close to handling it - they will all generate enough heat to melt lots of things. Conservatively, they'd have to be 8awg each to be able to handle the full load without melting if they ended up taking the f…
Can we talk about how absolutely terrifying is that 600W figure? We're not transcoding or generating slop as the primary use case, we're playing computer games . What was wrong with the previous-generation graphics that we still need to push for more raw performance, rather than reducing power draw?
12vhpwr has almost no safety margin. Any minor problem with it rapidly becomes major. 600W is scary, with reports of 800W spikes. 12V2x6 is particularly problematic because any imbalance, such as a bad connection of a single pin, will quickly push things over spec. For example, at 600W, 8.3A are carried on each pin in the connector. Molex Micro-Fit 3.0 connectors are typically rated to 8.5A -- That's almost no margin…
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Can we talk about how absolutely terrifying is that 600W figure? We're not transcoding or generating slop as the primary use case, we're playing computer games . What was wrong with the previous-generation graphics that we still need to push for more raw performance, rather than reducing power draw?
What was “wrong” is that enough people are willing to pay exorbitant prices for the highest-end gear that Nvidia can do most anything they want as long as their products have the best numbers. Other companies do make products with lower power draw — Apple in particular has some good stuff in this space for people who need it for AI and not gaming. And even in the gaming space, you have many options for good products…
What’s wild is that this is a company clearly capable of designing highly complex things with numerous tradeoffs, challenges and unknowns. And then the fuckin cable is the issue. Repeatedly.
It boggles the mind how a $10 space heater has better overheating protection than this $4000 space heater.
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No sane individual is going to buy 5090 for $2000-100000 and hook it up to a $15 Power supply.
Correct, but it turns out, a fair fraction of the people who day 1 purchase a GPU for that much may not necessarily be described as wholly sane.
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If only we had connectors which could actually handle such currents. Maybe something along the lines of an XT90, but no Nvidia somehow wants to save a bit of space or weight on their huge brick of a card. I don't get it.
At these wattages just give it its own mains plug.
https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcQqLXew...
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Correct, but it turns out, a fair fraction of the people who day 1 purchase a GPU for that much may not necessarily be described as wholly sane.
They aren't insane, just not thrifty with their money.
But I've also known some people who did that when they did not have the disposable income to do it.