I'm a little confused by the passive cooling of these cards. What are dedicated expansion slot cooling solutions like? Does that just mean a well ventilated system? I'm very curious why these cards can ship with a passive option but none of the home desktop cards can ship with a passive option. I'm been looking for ages for a solution that can handle most games at "high" settings (or maybe some slightly older games at "max") and 1080p res for building a HTPC/Console replacement but I want to keep it pretty much passive or just one very low dB system fan and nothing seems to exist out there for keeping the video card cool... (HD-Plex has the CPU covered for a passive solution...)
The passive cards are meant for rackmount servers, which will have strong fans in the sever specifically meant to cool the expansion slots. A standard PC case, even with good airflow, would not work with these cards. You need high volume, highly directed (and high noise) airflow for this to work.
Yep... Imagine circular saw running on max with no load (similar sound). The one for which you need ear protection when you work nearby. Oh, and that "saw" spins at 15k rpm...
"passive cooling of these cards¨ ?!!. Take a look at the vents on the front side of the cards. These are exhaust vents for the twin large fans inside the unit!. There is no way a 200+ watt chip is going to be passively cooled in such a small enclosure!. The amount of air being pushed is significant just to keep the card under 70 deg C. This in a machine room of 16 DegC controlled temp, you can see the temp delta, hence the heat dissipated by each of these cards.
I hope we can see a comparison between this and the newest AMD S10000, which also comes with 12GB of memory, some 30% more TFLOPS in single precision mode and an (expected from extrapolation from the 6GB version) significantly lower price.
I don't think AMD should be seen as a serious contender in this area. The closest thing they had was their "Close to Metal" initiative which, true to its name, offered a great deal of control but was as useless in the long run as something programmed completely in assembly: architecture and the software/hardware ecosystem are what make all the difference. Theoretical FLOPS by itself (in single precision to boot) means about as much theoretical 1000 Base-T networking did when the standard was created in 1998... practically nothing. Maybe you might actually use the bandwidth for a highly customized application but without any abstraction all you have is a very specific solution that cannot be generalized to anything else.
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Acarney - Monday, November 18, 2013 - link
I'm a little confused by the passive cooling of these cards. What are dedicated expansion slot cooling solutions like? Does that just mean a well ventilated system? I'm very curious why these cards can ship with a passive option but none of the home desktop cards can ship with a passive option. I'm been looking for ages for a solution that can handle most games at "high" settings (or maybe some slightly older games at "max") and 1080p res for building a HTPC/Console replacement but I want to keep it pretty much passive or just one very low dB system fan and nothing seems to exist out there for keeping the video card cool... (HD-Plex has the CPU covered for a passive solution...)Ryan Smith - Tuesday, November 19, 2013 - link
The passive cards are meant for rackmount servers, which will have strong fans in the sever specifically meant to cool the expansion slots. A standard PC case, even with good airflow, would not work with these cards. You need high volume, highly directed (and high noise) airflow for this to work.HollyDOL - Tuesday, November 19, 2013 - link
Yep... Imagine circular saw running on max with no load (similar sound). The one for which you need ear protection when you work nearby. Oh, and that "saw" spins at 15k rpm...mehminer - Saturday, March 6, 2021 - link
I know I"m a bit late, but maybe someone will see this. There are online vendors of cooling kits for K40 (and other Nvidia) cards. Here's one: poly-fab , https://www.ebay.com/itm/Nvidia-Tesla-Compact-Blow...Communism - Tuesday, November 19, 2013 - link
Something like thishttp://images.anandtech.com/doci/6842/20130319_103...
From this article:
http://www.anandtech.com/show/6842/
fteoath64 - Wednesday, November 20, 2013 - link
"passive cooling of these cards¨ ?!!. Take a look at the vents on the front side of the cards. These are exhaust vents for the twin large fans inside the unit!. There is no way a 200+ watt chip is going to be passively cooled in such a small enclosure!. The amount of air being pushed is significant just to keep the card under 70 deg C. This in a machine room of 16 DegC controlled temp, you can see the temp delta, hence the heat dissipated by each of these cards.comomolo - Tuesday, November 19, 2013 - link
I hope we can see a comparison between this and the newest AMD S10000, which also comes with 12GB of memory, some 30% more TFLOPS in single precision mode and an (expected from extrapolation from the 6GB version) significantly lower price.woogitboogity - Thursday, March 27, 2014 - link
I don't think AMD should be seen as a serious contender in this area. The closest thing they had was their "Close to Metal" initiative which, true to its name, offered a great deal of control but was as useless in the long run as something programmed completely in assembly: architecture and the software/hardware ecosystem are what make all the difference. Theoretical FLOPS by itself (in single precision to boot) means about as much theoretical 1000 Base-T networking did when the standard was created in 1998... practically nothing. Maybe you might actually use the bandwidth for a highly customized application but without any abstraction all you have is a very specific solution that cannot be generalized to anything else.benouz - Thursday, November 27, 2014 - link
Do you know OpenCL?The common API designed for parallel computing. This is what AMD and many others HW vendor support
https://www.khronos.org/opencl/