Hardware Discussion Thread

[NaturalViolence]

MaJoR Wrote:Since I'm on the subject... I hate mechanical keyboards. It's just not my thing. Mechanical keyboards have big clunky keys and insanely long keytravel. Sure they activate half way, but why not just cut the keytravel to have and let you press it all the way? And why not make the keys shorter? Meh. Flat and thin keys and super short keytravel for me, pretty much just like a laptop keyboard. I even got a Razer Arctosa keyboard for my desktop just because it is that kind of keyboard. I suppose my very rapid typing could adjust to a mechanical keyboard and half-presses, but mechanical keyboards are very expensive, and I don't like the big fat old fashioned keys anyway.

You know you can get different keys/switches that activate at different points on the downward stroke.

[MayImilae]

That doesn't solve my primary complaints.

I should point out, as you were making your post I edited mine to specify my complaints a little clearer.

[DatKid20]

I got a motherboard for my new PC finally. I really want to sell my motherboard and cpu and switch it for a intel equivalent but I'll keep them for now.

[DatKid20]

750ti vs 260 (I have the 260) go!

[NaturalViolence]

What exactly do you want to know?

The 750 TI is about twice as fast across the board in games. About 2 to 4 times as fast in compute applications (openCL, directcompute, and cuda). Runs 7 db quieter (about a 40% drop in noise), runs 10C cooler (comparison done using stock coolers on both cards), uses about 1/3 of the power (60 watts vs 180) at full load, 1/4 of the idle power consumption (20 watts vs 80), and is a hell of a lot smaller (about half as long and uses 1 slot instead of 2). It also supports dx11 and openGL 4.x instead of dx10 and openGL 3.x, pci-e 3.0 instead of pci-e 2.0, shadowplay, HDMI/displayport (including audio passthrough), DXVA 2.0 instead of 1.0, newer version of VDPAU, 6th gen pure video instead of 2nd gen, and a number of other stuff that the GTX 260 doesn't support (if you're not interested in any particular feature I'm not going to lookup all of them for you because it's a pretty long list).

[DatKid20]

You answered my question perfectly. I'm going to sell the gtx 260 and buy the 750ti.

[NaturalViolence]

I'm surprised by how much more efficient maxwell is compared to kepler. And this is without a die shrink. Later on in the year they're going to do a die shrink to 20nm and release the rest of the maxwell cards as the GTX 800 series on the new manufacturing process.

[DatKid20]

They started to make their GPU's with power efficiency for mobile devices being a priority leading to the greatness that is Maxwell.

[NaturalViolence]

Their tegra GPUs use the same architectures as their desktop/laptop chips but are always a few years outdated. They don't really develop separate microarchitectures for them. And your statement implies that tegra improvements trickle down to their other product lines when it is in fact the reverse. They're still in the process of moving tegra to kepler.

Power efficiency has always been a major concern for them since it directly translates into improved performance. Since GPU performance is generally limited by their cooling and heat is proportional to power consumption. Every microarchitecture they've come up with in recent years has improved efficiency considerably with the exception of fermi which maintained it while making improvements elsewhere.

To be fair GM107 has a much higher transistor count and die size than GK106 which contributes heavily to its improved efficiency. Improving efficiency while maintaining the same transistor count and transistor size is very very hard.

[DatKid20]

Nope. The Tegra architecture was just merged with the Desktop Architecture. Kepler will be the first desktop GPU architecture in mobile devices. I don't know why they weren't merged before but Nvidia themselves made the roadmap where Kepler is the first desktop GPU architecture on mobile devices.