AMD has launched their Bart series cards (the HD6870 and HD6850) and they sure pawn. But Nvidia surely won’t sit quietly and let them have their own way, since Cayman (the HD6970) is just around the corner. During the PDX LAN event, Nvidia’s Tom Petersen previewed the upcoming GTX 580 card, and even demoed it, albeit on an Nvidia-developed demo app, on the Alien vs. Triangles tech demo app.
Apparently the new GTX 580 is so good, like a nuclear reactor for home usage that Nvidia needs to improve the cooling from the GT-400 series. It’s faster, but it’s hotter and more power consuming. So, Nvidia went the Vapor way. Vapor cooling is not new to graphic cards, as Sapphire has already implemented it on AMD’s cards for quite some time on their Vapor-X cards.
Vapor chamber cooling technology is simple. Unlike typical heatsink which sits on top of the chips, now you have a chamber with liquid sandwiched in between the heatsink and the chip, which somehow transfer the heat from the chip faster, making it cooler. When the chip runs cooler, it performs more efficiently and consumes less voltage.
According to the slides shown by Tom Petersen, the new GTX 580 is not only cooler and quieter than the GTX 480; it is even quieter than the not so quiet GTX 285. The new cooler should keep the new card well cooled and at around 47dBA in gaming scenario. This is a quite an impressive result considering that Nvidia didn’t waste time to point out that this will be the fastest DirectX 11 card. Well, how long does this statement live up to its name is not known, as we’ve yet to see the Cayman cards’ performance. At least this card would be a folding monster, until client v7 comes out with AMD optimization that is.
via Fudzilla
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