NVIDIA’s Flagship RTX 30 Series GPUs Could Be Extremely Power Hungry

[Tsing]

Image: NVIDIA



The latest rumors suggest that the power demands of NVIDIA’s upcoming flagship RTX 30 Series graphics cards will be quite a bit higher than the current generation. According to recurring leakers KkatCorgi and kopite7kimi (via VideoCardz), the RTX 3080 Ti’s (3090?) PCB features over 20 inductors (power chokes) on an “extremely” packed PCB. That’s a substantial increase over the GeForce RTX 2080 Ti, whose PCB houses 16 cokes.



The implication here is that NVIDIA’s next flagship GPU(s) will be power-hungry beasts that leverage a very complex VRM. With inductors being a key component in power management, the...

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[Grimlakin]

So much for a smaller fab process resulting in less power use. More takes more... As has always been the case in the PC world.

 

[Burticus]

Shocked!

 

[Uvilla]

Is 20 vs 16 really that substantial?
To me again its a war of price price and price.
I expect the ti to be 1599. Then on down to the other tiers with a bunch of little steps ending with re heated crap at the low end.

 

[SmokeRngs]

Is 20 vs 16 really that substantial?
To me again its a war of price price and price.
I expect the ti to be 1599. Then on down to the other tiers with a bunch of little steps ending with re heated crap at the low end.

16 to 20 is a 25% increase. If we're talking a linear increase in power you could be looking at up to 25% increase in power usage. That's not a small increase and the power usage itself is not the only concern. Cooling the GPU as well as needing to dump that extra heat are problems in and of themselves.

 

[Brian_B]

A 300W+ GPU is a pretty beefy bitch.

I mean, for the people that are after performance above all else, the power draw (and cooling, and noise) won't mean anything. Sure, they may complain about needing to wear ear plugs sweating in a room heated like an oven, but they will still post their benchmarks and overclocking results with a raging hard on (and, for the record, I totally support those of you who want to do that - that's part of why we all play around with hardware - I use the language in loving jest with no small amount of jealousy). But then again, the price tag won't mean anything either -- look how many people, even here, already just accept that a 2180Ti (or whatever) will cost low-mid $1k.

 

[Armenius]

My understanding of the power phases are not complete, but my rough calculations would put max power at just about 350W is they're in a similar configuration to the RTX series. I imagine that they're adding at least one more for the extra memory, which would mean 16 phases with LR22 inductors and 4 with LR47 compared to 13 and 3. But just because it can handle that much power does not mean that is how much it will use.

So much for a smaller fab process resulting in less power use. More takes more... As has always been the case in the PC world.

Less power for the same amount of performance, yes. You want to have more performance, you have to increase the power. As things get smaller, leakage can also be a larger issue that you have to take account for.

A 300W+ GPU is a pretty beefy bitch.

I mean, for the people that are after performance above all else, the power draw (and cooling, and noise) won't mean anything. Sure, they may complain about needing to wear ear plugs sweating in a room heated like an oven, but they will still post their benchmarks and overclocking results with a raging hard on (and, for the record, I totally support those of you who want to do that - that's part of why we all play around with hardware - I use the language in loving jest with no small amount of jealousy). But then again, the price tag won't mean anything either -- look how many people, even here, already just accept that a 2180Ti (or whatever) will cost low-mid $1k.

Lest we forget, the 390X was a 300+ watt card. Some aftermarket versions pushed 400 watts.

 

[Dan_D]

So much for a smaller fab process resulting in less power use. More takes more... As has always been the case in the PC world.

One of the things you run into is the same situation we saw with AMD's Ryzen 3000 series. The reduction in power usage gives them more transistor budget as it were to increase performance. I never thought for a second the successor to the RTX 2080 Ti's would use less power than their predecessors.