Report: GTX 880 PCB Pictured
Images have been posted of what may be the PCB of the upcoming Nvidia GTX 880 graphics card. We cannot be certain, but this is what the report claims. The original report stems from the Chinese website MyDrivers.com, which is not a source we've come across before. Most of the PCB is blurred out in the images, but the details that we do get to see are the GPU, the memory, the SLI fingers, and the power connectors. We'll start off with the GPU.
The most relevant bits of information on the GPU are Nvidia, Taiwan, and 1421A1. The Taiwan label tells us that it is probably a TSMC fabricated chip, while the 1421A1 label tells us that the chip was baked on the 21st week of 2014. A1 is the version number. Overall, we cannot deduce which chip this is, as it could be either a GM204 chip or a bigger GM210 chip. We do suspect that it is a new Maxwell chip, because for an older chip we'd expect a higher version number.
The memory on the card is presented as 16 GB of GDDR5 memory, with each side of the PCB revealing eight 1 GB chips. This tells us that this is almost certainly a development card, as we really do not expect a retail consumer card, no matter how high-end, to come with such a large amount of memory. Realistically, we would expect 4 GB of memory to be present on the final version of the supposed GTX 880 graphics card.
Lastly, the images also reveal that the card has two six-pin PCIe power connectors accompanied by a single 8-pin power connector. This is more than the GTX 780 Ti features, and given that Maxwell will be more efficient, we suspect that this is once again because this might be a test PCB.
All said, this might not even be the GTX 880, and these rumors don't really tell us anything believable. As it stands, we believe the specifications for the GTX 880 that are most believable are that it will pack a GM204 GPU with 3200 CUDA cores along with 4 GB of GDDR5 memory which runs over a 256-bit memory interface. Take this rumor of the card carrying 16 GB of memory with a pinch of salt.
There was also a rumor a few weeks ago about the GTX 880 and GTX 880 Ti being cheaper than the GTX 780 Ti, which we find questionable at best.
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Thats... Not right at all. Just because a console has 8gb of vram doesn't mean it has anything close to the power required to fill it up, most of its used for other things, remember its shared with system ram.
Sir, please don't try to match console entire memory to just gpu memory on a PC nor how games run on a PC and game console.
xbox one and PS4 uses that same memory for both graphics AND cpu while modern high end PC's have it separated.
Also games on these 2 different systems are programmed to take memory from both vram and system ram for the pc vs these game consoles.
On top of that, just because you have "X" GB's of memory for gpu, doesn't mean that a system is able to utilize it effectively....
For example.... GTX titan black vs GTX 780 ti..... 6GB of memory in the titan black and yet has hardly any performance improvements over the 780 ti.....
At $500 is cheaper than GTX780ti and it should give more performance (around 30% I believe which would come with the greater perf per watt, moar cores and with what GTX750 showed us, more Hz..).
Please pass the salt shaker!
Thats... Not right at all. Just because a console has 8gb of vram doesn't mean it has anything close to the power required to fill it up, most of its used for other things, remember its shared with system ram.
Sir, please don't try to match console entire memory to just gpu memory on a PC nor how games run on a PC and game console.
xbox one and PS4 uses that same memory for both graphics AND cpu while modern high end PC's have it separated.
Also games on these 2 different systems are programmed to take memory from both vram and system ram for the pc vs these game consoles.
On top of that, just because you have "X" GB's of memory for gpu, doesn't mean that a system is able to utilize it effectively....
For example.... GTX titan black vs GTX 780 ti..... 6GB of memory in the titan black and yet has hardly any performance improvements over the 780 ti.....
3GB is reserved for the operating system on Xbox, thats already down to 5GB, then there is the regular RAM, that is about 1.5GB-2GB for a high end game, so thats 3GB used for VRAM.
Both the PS4 and Xbox One can't access more than 3.5GB of RAM for game related operations. One of the two is actually less than the other by 512MB, but makes up for it with virtual memory to market it as the same stat. I won't say which because I don't want console-fan flame war, but it isn't the one you are thinking.
So no, no matter how unoptimized a "next-gen" port is to PC you won't see 8GB of VRAM usage. At maximum you would be looking at 3.5GB. That said, I won't be buying Maxwell without at least 6GB of VRAM for higher resolution gaming.
As for the pictured GPU above, I kind of wonder if it isn't a dual GPU board. It has a lot of RAM and a lot of power flowing into it. I kind of think maybe all that blurred images and the back side of the card might be hiding a second GPU, and this is actually going to be something like the GTX 890