First R600 Review - The Radeon HD 2900XT

mrneutron2004 writes "Tweaktown seems to have the first review out of the gate on AMD's flagship R600 core. 'Our focus today is solely on the HD 2900 XT 512MB GDDR-3 graphics card – it is the first GPU with a fast 512-bit memory interface but what does this mean for performance? ... After taking a look at the GPU and the card from PowerColor as well as some new Ruby DX10 screenshots, we will move onto the benchmarks and compare the red hot flaming Radeon monster against Nvidia's GeForce 8800 GTX along with the former ATI GPU king, the Radeon X1950 XTX."

Comments

Re:Watt

[jacksonj04]

Because the only people who use performance GPUs are those who want to simply get as much kick as possible, be it graphics designers, gamers or medical imaging. In these situations the machines won't be sat in a rack, and power is irrelevant as long as the PSU can supply it. The heat can quite easily be dissipated from high performance desktop towers either via liquid cooling or just enormous heat sinks and fans.

CPUs, on the other hand, are driven a large part by servers, which do sit in racks and need to run on as low power as possible, because power = heat = bad.

One important thing to recognise is that power requirements per unit speed are actually dropping, it's just that speed increases faster than this increase in efficiency. CPUs have a slower rate of speed increase in terms of what is required of them, so power efficiency (Which is also a higher priority) has a chance to catch up.