News Nvidia GTX 580 power limit bypassed

Tulatin, to add to that, games should not stress the graphics card willy-nilly where it is unnecessary - although the card should not be damaged by the extra stress.

 

Correction, games should not have sections of unlimited frame rates. There's no viable reason for frame rates beyond 120fps, so setting a cap at 120 (in reality, just above is safer to ensure a smooth 120+fps for 120Hz monitors) should be standard. A frame rate cap at a decent level has no downside and can save power/noise from fans/heat/card death.

I've got a buddy studying game programming at the moment. He puts caps on all of his games, even ones that take just a couple hours to make. No reason for Blizzard, or any company, to leave one out.

 

It's not the fault of game developers that the cards are being damaged by "Extra stress". Processors can run at 100% indefinately, you know. If a graphics card cannot maintain it's temperatures when running at it's designed frequencies, then something's done wrong.

 

Is it really that poorly designed though if the designer put a control system on it that kept it from reaching that power draw? It only becomes dangerous if somebody takes that control system off - a lot of other things become dangerous too when control systems are taken off. Nuclear reactors ( I guess this analogy doesnt help at all lol) are pretty scary with loss of a control system, but that doesnt make them 'poorly designed'.

The 580 is not poorly designed because nVidia put a control system on it. Only someone who took it off and then played a game with no limit to framerate would be in trouble - but that would be their own fault.

 

that is what I was thinking too, definitely running a processor at 100% 24/7, will shorten its life. (maybe shedding of a year or two from its MTBF specification), but a GPU that will last only a few mins to a few hours because of the basically same scenario?. about starcraft 2, its not like you will stand on the menu for a few hours right?

 

might if you go afk
im sure ive left games paused for hours to go watch a grand prix

 

And how does that add up to 350?

Even with

8pin + 8pin + PCI-E slot
150W 150w 75w

we'd be pretty close, wouldn't we? Looks like this beast might run at -10 degrees Celsius using a Prometeia Mach II GT.

 

do not think the 6pin is 150w think its 125w (8 + 6 + PCI-e slot thats what an GTX580 comes with not 8 pins)

starcraft 2 thing was related to cheaper video cards that only had just enough cooling to just keep them cool + dust SC2 would make them toast and fail (i could see a lot of Nvidia compaq or HP laptops failing due to this)

Customer call
laptop will not boot up
power light comes on
is it an compaq
yes
does it have an green sticker that says Nivida on it
emm
bottom right hand coroner or left below the keyboard
yes
the laptop has most likely died due to an fault inside the laptop its an permanent fault, laptop most likely would need replacing

(i would still call out just to Flip the ram see if it was that but normally its dead)

 

Who said 6pin is 150W? It's 75W. Hence you'd need at least 2 x 8pin to run the card w/o limiter.

 

yeah that's what I was sayin perp, quoting maverick.. it's out of spec

 

No - there's no hard limits on the amounts that can be drawn, just the limits to remain within specification. So if you remove the limiter and draws more power, it's not a big deal - under normal conditions, it shouldn't.

 

Two parts wrong with that:

1. You're arguing that there's nothing wrong with programs using unnecessary amounts of system resources. If your processor can run at 100% indefinitely then surely you won't mind your operating system putting it at max load 24/7. Nothing wrong with that scenario, right?

2. As shocking as this may be, even processors can overheat when run at 100%. The tricky thing is, most people with a system designed/built poorly enough to cause this won't be running anything which pushes their system so hard. Along comes Starcraft 2 with its massive popularity and relatively low system requirements. Suddenly, people who never once thought about heat are finding out that their dusty, archaic case without proper ventilation will roast their card when put under such a load.

 

Is it safe though?

 

Actually 6 and 8 pin PCIe are both 150 Watt. There are no additional wires for 8-pin. The spec called for an additional sense wire with 8-pin so that the wattage could be increased, but PSU manufacturers instead do the sensing inside the PSU and on the ATX connector, so that a 6-pin connector does 150 Watt with ease.

If you take a look at PCIe connectors, you'll see that the 8-pin version has its two extra pins simply looped back into two existing ground wires, this to satisfy some GPUs which actually check for their presence.

 

found this.. it might be able to supply an extra 50w without burning up the wire

I remember when they had the 6 to 8 pin adapters that came with the video cards too.. then someone pointed out it could cause a fire or something and they stopped supplying them with the card

 

No other graphics card has ever needed a limiter like this. If the card's capable of drawing such a massive amount of power that it needs to be heavily limited to fall within specification, it's doing something wrong. Very wrong. Doubly so if, as people say, it's not doing anything extra with that power.

Right, so we're seeing a max potential power draw of 350W...

Wait, wut? Does this mean that if we used 2 8-pin plugs on a 580, we'd see even more? I shudder to think!

 

why are fast saloon cars limited to 150mph?

i don't understand why people see the limiter to be an issue, as long as it produces fast enough performance, why bother fiddle with it?

when you game, it's very similar to driving the fast saloon car on speed limited motorway, as long as it's fast enough, with horsepower to spare, why does anything else matter?

the limiter only becomes an issue when you try to go on the tracks, (aka benchmark) but as tests have shown, 580 doesn't get limited in benchmarks. besides, you can't play benchmarks.

 

So isn't it a good thing that nVidia have managed to limit power to consumption-heavy yet results-low parts of the card then? The fact that nVidia have managed to lower the temperatures yet increase the performance without fundamentally changing the core should be commended... right?

 

Creating a card that had lower temperatures, faster performance, and lower power consumption would be a hat-trick. My issue comes with this:

nVidia start throttling the card heavily, should it start going past its stated power draw. The card shouldn't be able to go past its stated power draw - it should draw what it needs, and no more. Rather than saying "This card draws a maximum of 260W, because we're throttling it", they should be saying "This card draws 350W, but that shouldn't happen in gameplay." - better yet, design the card to only be able to draw 260W, not 350W and put on a cap.

To go back to the beaten (and quite frankly, broken) car analogy, it's the equivalent of Ferrari saying "Oh yes, sir, you'll get 12 miles per gallon at 150mph, all possible to this special little gadget we've installed that cuts your engine out half the time, since otherwise it'd be 6mpg". - remember, we're talking about a wasteful, excessive, and more importantly, outside ATX-spec, design. A power-draw limiter isn't the same as a speed limiter.