^ I bet any money it costs LESS to put water-cooling on a flagship card than $3-4 billion it costs to design a GPU architecture with 2X perf/watt. SirPauly lives in the clouds where Company A magically competes with Company B as if they have the same resources. He either pretends that's the case or doesn't see the financial reality in which AMD and NV operate.
AMD's engineers are super smart because they are given way less to work with than Intel's and NV's engineers. The fact that NV didn't blow AMD out of the water in the last 8 years is stunning. NV is primarily a graphics card company while AMD has other businesses to split R&D and workforce capital across. If going WC+HBM is a more cost effective way right now, that's the right approach. Again, all things being equal, I would take WC Maxwell all day over any blower.
You say the Titan blower is good but it's
still mediorce if you want to overclock a 250-275W GPU compared to say Gigabyte Windforce 3X 600W for example:
"In the automatic regulation mode, when the fans accelerated steadily from a silent 1000 RPM to a comfortable 2040 RPM, the peak GPU temperature was 78°C.
It is about 20°C better than with the reference cooler and much quieter, too! Thats just an excellent performance for a cooler of the worlds fastest graphics card."
http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/gr...orce-gtx-titan-black-ghz-edition_4.html#sect0
120mm rad cools 295X2, something that Windforce cooler can dream of. That shows you just how much superior water is over air for GPU cooling at similar power dissipation.
You made an inference that AIO LC costs more than a high quality water cooler from Asetek, but how do you know that? The BOM for Titan Black's cooler could be $40-50! If you buy 2-4 million 120mm rad AIO LC kits in volume from Asetek, you don't think you can get them for $40-50?
Secondly, you talk about mounting issues. When was the last time you saw a case that has neither a 120mm front or rear fan section? Who buys $350+ GPUs and installs them into a $20 case? Again, WC is especially superior with dual cards. Since I am specifically discussing flagship products, OEMs like Alienware or Origin or MainGear or CyberPower will have no issues mounting a 120mm rad-cooled $500 graphics card.
Third, let's talk about efficiency. Let's assume some worst case scenario: R9 390X uses 300W of power and is only 20% faster than 980 for $550. That's a delta of 135W against a reference 980.
Let's take some unhealthy gamer who has no life, no kids, no friends, no real world job, and plays 4 hours a day every day all year.
$0.30 per kWh x 135W delta x 4hr a day x 365 days / 1000W in 1 kWh ~ $59.
Ok, that's the cost of 1 PC game or 1 month of your cell phone bill. But wait, in North America we don't generally pay $0.30 per kWh and no healthy adult plays 4 hours a day every day unless that's his job or he is a millionaire / disabled person who uses gaming like reading/listening to music, etc.
On Toronto, Canada, peak rage is 14 cents, mid < 12 cents or roughly $0.10 USD:
http://www.torontohydro.com/sites/e.../yourbilloverview/Pages/ElectricityRates.aspx
That means 3X less than the $59 I calculated, or ~$20 a year. Therefore, if you are a
very heavy gamer and you play 4 hours a day, based on electricity prices in NA, you would
lose $20-25 annually with 135W higher power usage. That's like taking your gf/wife to the movies ONCE! If to someone $20-25 a year is too much, they shouldn't be buying $300 GPUs and $50 PC games to begin with.
That's why marketing people hate finance guys like me. I break their marketing BS into mathematics and disprove their marketing claims that something matters more than it does. In fact, history shows us that the
greatest cost of videocard ownership is depreciation/value lost on resale, not electricity costs.
With the above data, WC solves my temperate and noise levels, allows me to run dual cards cooler and quieter and affects my CPU temperatures less, which in turn allows me to downsize my case.
What about MiniITX guys? Well, since PC gaming is moving to 4K, MiniITX is going to be struggling to keep up for 4K gaming in the next 5 years. It's not going to be possible to create a rig with multiple high end cards in such a cramped case. If someone with a MiniITX has no desire to upgrade to 4K in the next 5 years, there will be plenty of $400 and below cards that are air cooled. I am talking specifically $500+ flagship cards where NV/AMD should give us the OPTION of WC. The cooler on Titan Z proves that it's inferior to WC on 295X2:
http://m.sweclockers.com/artikel/18944-nvidia-geforce-gtx-titan-z/20
Wins in temperatures, noise levels, despite 295X2 using way more power.
The opposition to WC reminds me of hardcore Porsche fans but we know the modern 911 is a way better performing sports car after it went to water. It's no wonder the top Pc enthisiasts all watercool their GPUs.
Furthermore, since lower temperature of a chip lower its power consumption, a water cooled 250W card would be
faster since it could be clocked higher vs. an air cooled 250W card.
Going Hybrid WC is a huge win-win, not a failure as you paint it. It would allow NV and AMD to create 275-300W single GPU monster cards and not worry about high temperatures and noise levels. Since 4K is so demanding, we are going to need as much performance leaps as possible as demand for 4K desktop PC gaming increases. For that to happen, the GPU makers should combine improvements in Perf/watt with WC standard for their flagship single and dual-GPU products.
Again, I am not saying that WC > perf/watt universally. I am just saying WC is a low hanging fruit that has major positive implications. Make 250-300W flagship desktop cards water cooled and see if the consumer/market embraces them. Worst case, NV and AMD can always go back to air. For everyone else who only cares about Perf/watt, there will be plenty of mid-range 150-170W cards for the next 10 years to keep you satisfied.
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