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Originally Posted by tycho102
Actually, the issue with Nvidia is they've been using VERY POOR voltage regulators in an attempt to keep people from overclocking the cards much. The 5900XT and the 7900GS were notoriously overclockable -- to the point where people were burning out the VRM's, not the chips.
Nvidia has absolutely got to keep "market segmentation" viable. Market segmention works like this:
You make a 60/80/120mm wafer that has all your chips on it.
Some of these chips will be really, really awesome. Those are your high-end chips that go into $1000 cards. Sometimes this is 5% of the total number of chips, sometimes it's 15% and you just cannot *sell* that many $1000 cards.
They run the "bad" chips through an etcher, which cuts connections to the "bad" parts of the chip, which gives the low-end range of cards. Other chips are just rated at lower speeds and go into the middle range cards.
So when you do this, some of those middle-range cards will overclock really awesome. And some of the low-end cards will overclock well because the poor cache has been cut out. In both instances, this hinders sales of high-end cards.
So they have moved to limit the VRM's. Which means you need "clean" power, rather than just lots of power (12v). It's not going to be long before Nvidia will require you to have a line conditioner hooked up to your computer so that your PSU will be able to output very clean power.
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I already run a Line conditioner and have been for quite some time. Keeps clean power to my system.
ATI takes a different approach however and they are going to make a 250 Watter too - and it will also be designed to overclock (Not sure why you would want to add more heat to your box by overclocking this mini soace heater, but there ya go!). ATI actually encourages overclocking since its even built into the XTX boards by default, and it is in ATI's software even. I click the little button and ATI's software goes to work and figures out the ultimate clock speed based on chip temperature automatically. THis is not something that is hidden and you need to unlock - it is the default software for my XTX. THe GPU is rated to 120 C (Ouch), but 90 C (Still ouch!) seems to be where the software will guage your card at.
My default temps while running 3D non overclocked on the XTX hover around 55 to 60 C, so you can guess that I can overclock this x1900 XTX quite far.
Anyway, there ya go.
-S