GeForce 7950 GT Launches With Passive Cooling

An anonymous reader writes "NVIDIA's GeForce 7950 GT comes with great performance at an attractive $299/£225 launch price. Incredibly, XFX's pre-overclocked card comes with a passive cooling solution. From the article: 'There is no doubting that NVIDIA's GeForce 7950 GT is faster and cheaper than the GeForce 7900 GT that launched at the same price point earlier in the year. There is a lot to like about the product, and there is even more to like about XFX's implementation. It's generally a match for ATI's Radeon X1900XT 512MB in popular games.'"

Comments

Oh good!

[mrchaotica]

Now I can fry eggs on the heatsink without the fan splattering yolk everywhere! : )

Re:Oh good!

[BubFranklin]

hard boiling eggs directly in the shell has been the preffered method in our office.(works on passive and fan cooled cpus) We did the math, and we save about $4.50 a year in power savings over microwaved hardboiled eggs.

Re:Oh good!

[YA_Python_dev]

You got modded funny, but the thing is really hot: without an extra fan in the case, the article mentions "temperatures approaching 110 degrees Celcius (sic)" (for people not familiar with degrees Celsius, 100 degrees is the boiling point of water at normal atmospheric pressure).

Re:Oh good!

[gbobeck]

For those who just want to see a unit conversion, 110 degrees C is roughly equivalent to 230 degrees Fahrenheit.

Or in more practical (and painful) terms, roughly the same temperature as the coffee spills that burn you in the crotchal area when you hit a bump in the road whilst drinking coffee during your morning commute.

Re:Oh good!

[straponego]

for people not familiar with degrees Celsius
The word you're searching for is "Americans"...

Re:Oh good!

[Zach978]

anyone who passes middle school chemistry knows 100 C = 212 F...even here in the states

Re:Oh good!

[gbobeck]

110C coffee?!? You're american aren't you?

Yes I am. I thought the etl.cs.luc.edu (*.luc.edu = Loyola University Chicago) link in my URL field was a clear give away.

And just as an FYI, The optimum coffee brewing temerature is between 194 to 204 degrees Fahrenheit (90 - 95.55-ish degrees Celsius. (at least according to http://metropoliscoffee.com/university/brewing/per fectcoffee.php )

Cooling can always be made active these days.

[Sadko]

Cooling can always be made active these days. Just buy something like Zallman Cooler (http://www.newegg.com/product/product.asp?item=N8 2E16835118117). Installation (which replaces the original cooling) is 10 minutes, and the cards these days are made with standard mounting, and it's usually gets your card down 10-15 degrees. The only drawback is that it makes 1-slot card to be 2-slot wide. Cheers,

Re:Cooling can always be made active these days.

[jonnykelly]

Gee, ya think? But wasn't the point here that this card got these kind of stats WITHOUT active cooling (and thereby not requiring one to give up another slot as your advice puts forth).

Re:Cooling can always be made active these days.

[Babbster]

I'm pretty sure the idea is that passive cooling is preferable to active cooling - less noise, less power consumption and no moving part to fail. It's of particular interest to those running HTPC machines - if their case is cool enough, they can have a "real" video card with which to do some serious gaming.

Good for HTPC type setups

[i.of.the.storm]

Great way to replace an XBox360 or PS3, put a computer with one of these in your living room and use it as a console/htpc type thing. But, does it run linux*? *have good drivers?

Re:Good for HTPC type setups

[jascat]

But, does it run linux*? *have good drivers? Yes. Better than ATI at least. Not open source, but the drivers are good. My 7800GS works great. Q4 runs faster under Linux than under Windows here.

Re:Good for HTPC type setups

[psymastr]

/. is full of misinformation about 3D performance under linux. Yes, I have an nvidia card, yes, I have the latest drivers and no, id games are not faster under linux. I tried it because I'd read a million times in /. how 3D is better in linux because of better memory/disk management and all that bullshit.

This is certainly not the case. 3D performance is not better in linux than in Windows. It's actually quite a bit worse. Granted, it's probably not because of the OS itself but because nvidia spends more resources on developing drivers for windows than it does for linux.

If you truly get better performance with Q4 under linux, install the latest windows drivers and enable DMA or whatever weird thing you've messed up in windows. Because I did extensive testing with four different timedemos I recorded and they all say the same thing.

Video card related question

[the_humeister]

With the advent of video cards that are Turing complete in recent years and sites such as this, how feasible is it to run an actual operating system on the video card itself? It seems like it would be possible to write a kernel as a shader program, upload it, and just have it run.

Re:Video card related question

[gEvil (beta)]

But, beyond the stupid geek factor, what would be the point?

Derrr, to free up the CPU for software rendering?

cheaper at the same price point?

[Anonymous Coward]

There is no doubting that NVIDIA's GeForce 7950 GT is faster and cheaper than the GeForce 7900 GT that launched at the same price point earlier in the year.

say what now?

I like the two DVI ports...

[HatchedEggs]

Sounds good to me... I'm pretty impressed by its performance and features overall.

It has a heck of a heat sink on it, and no whirring fans to add to the rest of the noise from your case. Which is just fine by me.

_________
http://hatchedeggs.blogspot.com/

Re:I like the two DVI ports...

[karnal]

uh..huh.

Taken from Newegg:

Package Contents: 2 x DVI to VGA Adapter

I think they thought of you when they put teh card in teh boxxorz!

Gl & HF

[tirefire]

From TFA: "While we're on the subject of the card being fanless, you're going to need to have good airflow inside your system to keep this card adequately cool."

I've used a few passive cards before, and they've all crashed my games when they haven't had airflow over them. I thought elimination of airflow (i.e. noise) was the purpose of passive coolers?

The best compromise between noise and performance is, imo, to buy an active Zalman cooler like the VF700 on my X800. It has a 5V "quiet" setting that keeps the card cool and very quiet as well as a 12V setting that's great for overclocking. Their design is pretty different from any stock cooler, and once you see the difference in performance, you'll understand why.

Large fans versus small fans

[Anonymous Coward]

The thing that I like about passively cooled system components is that cooling duties can be taken care of by larger fans than could ever be put onto a component (in this case, a video card). Those larger fans can move more air per minute at a lower RPM and therefore at a lower noise level. Even when the noise level isn't that much lower, it's also at a lower frequency due to the RPM difference, and those lower frequencies are often more easily ignored.

maybe I missed something

[linuxpng]

or maybe I don't know what 'passive' means but I see a fan on the card.

Re:maybe I missed something

[cjb110]

congratulations, at least you've RTFFP, now go back and read the other pages, before clogging the tubes with more crap.

Performance Wise

[Deliveranc3]

There used to be the high end the mid range and the low end, (Radeon 9000pro, 9500pro and 9700pro Geforce 4Ti, 4600 and 4200) this was good the next generation of cards would have the performance of the old top card in it's mid level card and mid would be a bit above the new low end.

Then they moved to 4 levels 6000, 6600GT, 6800GT, 6800 ULTRA (The lineup was more full but these seemed to be the peaks in this particular generation, and the performance of subsequent generations would move one level up 1 became 2 and 2 became 3 etc losing about $50 - 100 a generation.

This addition provided something between high and middle when consumers really wanted something between mid and low.

As a result the high end got split while more and more people clung to the middle which was why the 9500 and 6600GT were so hugely popular as mid range cards.

High end buyers are starting to buy the mid range simply because game designers are realizing that the number of people buying $600 cards is going down and prices are going up as those consumers flee.

Hopefully they will return to the 3 price point system as that seems to be the best for consumers.

To card manufacturers, we're sorry about the press leaks but you better match last generations top model with a mid price card or you're going to get destroyed eventually.

Re:Performance Wise

[imboboage0]

Spot on. I've taken to recommending the mid-range cards over anything. I have had a 6600GT for a little over a year and I couldnt be anything but satisfied. It even OCs well. I wasn't able to drop 500 bucks on a GPU, so I went with the 150 dollar solution: Mid-Range. I think this is where most of the market is (for anything but OEMs anyway) because people don't want to spend an assload on a video card, but they want bang for the buck. It's my belief that the market is concentrated around the mid-range, and it's going to stay that way.

price

[MindStalker]

great performance at an attractive $299/£225 launch price

Wern't we just complaining about the $250 Wii console this morning. And now applauding a $299 graphic card as affordable.

Re:price

[Babbster]

Don't worry. The next time there's a discussion about "the death of PC gaming" there will be a dozen people telling us all about how you can make a PC gaming rig for less than the cost of a PS3. :)

Re:price

[ne0n]

Wern't we just complaining about the $250 Wii console this morning. And now applauding a $299 graphic card as affordable.

I guess gaming cards are like women: affordable != attractive.

Re:price

[evilviper]

Wern't we just complaining about the $250 Wii console this morning. And now applauding a $299 graphic card as affordable.

With a console, you'll actually be paying MSRP for it.

With computer components, it'll take a few weeks before it's selling for half-price, and less.

Re:gpu throttling

[m0biusAce]

Most video cards certainly do. I know for a fact nVidia cards so. They have different clock speeds for 2D (using no 3d applications, just your desktop and regular apps), and 3D in which the card clocks to maximium. Mobile versions of these graphic cards are even more power concious, they clock down even further, or employ other methods (such as shutting down parts of the GPU that are not being used completly, and reducing the number of PCI-E lanes used).

USA USA USA

[NotQuiteReal]

Of course we have 110C coffee here! We invented pressurized coffee cups just for that purpose!

We blast super heated coffee right down our throats, it's a real waker-upper in the morning, while driving giant SUV's down the highway and yaking on our cell phones!. Doesn't everyone like it HOT?

Foreign whimps.

I have to say.

[Ayanami Rei]

It seems more natural to talk of outdoor air temperature in Fahrenheit.
In a temperate region (like the United States), the range of 0-100 degrees enumerates the temperatures most people will experience through the course of a year.

0 = dangerously cold
25 = freezing
50 = cool
75 = warm
100 = dangerously hot

OTH I find it much simpler to speak of temperatures when concerning computers in degrees Celcius because, again, the range is more intuitive.

0 = your condensor is broken
25 = room temperature
50 = okay
75 = too hot
100 = meltdown