Saturday, February 7th 2009
NVIDIA Designs New GTX 260 PCB, Further Reduces Manufacturing Costs
The introduction of the new G200b series graphics processors sought to revive NVIDIA's stronghold over the high-end graphics market, by reducing manufacturing costs, and facilitating high-end graphics cards at unusually low price-points, to compete with rival ATI. The first SKU using the G200b GPU was the new GeForce GTX 260. The PCB of design of the new model (P654) saw several drastic changes, that also ended up contributing to the cost-cutting: all memory chips were placed in the business end of the PCB, and the VRM area rearranged. News emerging from Expreview suggests that NVIDIA has worked out an even newer PCB reference design (model: P897) that aims mainly to cut production costs further. The reference design graphics board based on the PCB will be given the internal name "D10U-20". A short list of changes is as follows:
Source:
Expreview
- The number of PCB layers has been reduced from 10 to 8, perhaps to compress or remove blank, redundant or rudimentary connections
- A 4+2 phase NVVDD power design using the ADP4100 voltage regulator IC, the FBVDDQ circuit has been reduced from 2 phases to 1, and the MOSFET package has been changed from LFPAK to DPAK grouping, to reduce costs. The ADP4100 lacks the I2C interface, which means voltage control will be much more difficult than on current PCBs of the GeForce 260,280, 285 and 295
- The optional G200b support-brace has been removed
- While the length of the PCB remains the same, the height has been reduced to cut costs
- BIOS EEPROM capacity reduced from 1 Mbit (128 KB) to 512 Kb (64 KB)
- Cheaper DVI connectors
78 Comments on NVIDIA Designs New GTX 260 PCB, Further Reduces Manufacturing Costs
correct me if im wrong :respect:
As for them removing unecessary parts I think if they were necessary they would have kept them there, its not like nvidia to make rediculous mistakes concearning board design.
Well folks, this isn't th 1st time they did this.
Read here and here
My being for or against this practice hasn't surfaced in this thread, and is irrelevant anyway.
I guess what i meant earlier by this card having more cons then pro's was more in regards to overclocking capability and less room to play with in the bios. Taking away a phase would result in less efficiency and high temperatures at its weak point.
I do believe that Nvidia is capable of redesigning their cards to make them more efficient, more powerfull and cheaper to produce, but this card doesnt cover all 3. Maybe some of the lines are reduntant now, maybe they really are . . .
I think i would like to see this card directly compared. Anyone ?
I think this is a good progression of the GTX, though dropping 30-60 shaders, bringing memory down to like 640mb/512mb and calling it a GTS250 would've been a good move too imo. Sell it at a 150-170 pricepoint and gamers would be very happy indeed.
:toast:
At the end of the day, a reduction in costs has gotta be good, if with that comes an un-acceptable amount of returns then thats bad and they have failed but it's not as if either manufacturers have a particularily strong record in that department although I dont quite understand why NVidia are doing it at this late stage, both ATI and NVidia have new models on the way, NVidia already have the fastest overall card plus the 3 fastest single card solutions.......makes you wonder why they are doing this TBH.
As for why they are doing this I think that reducing costs is just a good reason to do it. Even if they release new cards, the GTX260 will stay for long IMO, just as the 8800GT, and making it cheaper is always good. I don't think this will result in higher returns or crippled overclocking. Many non-reference boards from many vendors are cheaper and simpler and that doesn't make them worse. Sometimes they're better than the reference ones, because they had the time to test many things and they can correct what its "wrong". This is no different.
cheaper is fine if it doesnt affect reliability or performance, but those always seem to get sacrifieced.check the news page. EVGA is offering software control with theirs, so they're definately going to stick with the current design of PCB.