GK110 Fully Enabled

[KompuKare]

The energy consumption of additional memory amount is negligible. This is because the refresh of the memory uses little energy, but writing and reading over the bus uses a lot (moving data is costly, Nvidia mentioned this in a presentation about future architectures a few years ago. Data locality is king). But since the bus width is constant, the amount of data transferred per time unit is also constant. Thus the dynamic power of 3, 6 and 12 GB on a 384-bit bus is the same.

I had though that there is obviously no way 12GB would be drawing three times what 3GB does (~90W), but I though the answer would have been down to the GDDR5 voltages or binning of chips.

This is a better explanation, although I'm a sure using better quality GDDR5 etc. plays a role too (if Gigabyte cheapened out on not using a chip which can monitor VRM temperatures and so on, I imagine they also did not use the best memory).

 

[Arachnotronic]

I'm sorry...I have to pick my jaw up off the ground.

Good job, Nvidia!

 

[BrightCandle]

The quadro's typically come with drivers that aren't very good for gaming. I do wonder if they will release a super duper ridiculously priced high end gamers card based on the fully enabled card or not.

 

[Arachnotronic]

The quadro's typically come with drivers that aren't very good for gaming. I do wonder if they will release a super duper ridiculously priced high end gamers card based on the fully enabled card or not.

Probably not - Nvidia makes far more selling these cards as Quadro parts than they do selling them as GeForce.

 

[boxleitnerb]

That was said of GK110 in general and look what happened
Same with all the older large GPUs.