NVIDIA GeForce GTX 880 "Maxwell" Engineering Sample Analysis

NVIDIA is quietly working on the GeForce 800 series graphics bill of fare which volition supercede the GeForce 700 series cards and characteristic the latest Maxwell graphics processing unit. While at that place have been hints that the GeForce GTX 880 ( the flagship GeForce 800 serial card) will launch in Q4 2022, it looks like GamerSky, a Chinese website has leaked the first engineering sample of the GeForce GTX 880 PCB which gives u.s.a. an early on glimpse of what to wait from NVIDIA'due south upcoming flagship component. NVIDIA GeForce GTX 880 ES Board_1

For starters, the GeForce GTX 880 PCB we are currently looking at is in ES phase and every bit stated by the source, the GeForce Maxwell core is labeled "1421A1" which is the A1 revision then this is a very early sample, prepared in the calendar month of May (nineteen-25) or the first 21 weeks of 2022. Its possible that we might run into variations in the concluding revision that volition utilise A2 and B1 revisions on the GeForce cards but the well-nigh important matter hasn't been mentioned that whether or not the card features a GM204 core or a GM210 core. But earlier we go into details regarding what core is featured on the PCB, allow'southward take a journeying in the by and tell you (our readers) why we believe this is a very physical leak.

If yous had been our readers since a long time, you would know that the GeForce GTX 680 PCB which was too leaked most 2 years ago had a very similar design scheme. The GeForce GTX 680'southward PCB was as well in ES phase and featured a light-green PCB and the same memory configuration as the one on the leaked PCB of the Maxwell card. Compared to the GeForce GTX Titan and 780 Ti PCB, the memory configuration is less dense since the cards make apply of a lower memory coach hence the similar arrangement of 8 memory chips on the front end and 8 retentivity chips on the dorsum which amount to a full of 16 memory chips on the entire PCB. The GeForce GTX 680 did feature just eight retention chips on the front end just NVIDIA making a big move on the GeForce GTX 880, equipping it with viii GB GDDR5 retentivity was quite unexpected just was rumored earlier. The memory fries in specific are the SKHynix H5GQ4H24MFR 0.5GB which are rated to operate at seven GHz effective clock speed, like to many NVIDIA Kepler based cards which would be a dainty improvement over the current generation.

Moving onward, we have the GPU core, it is not explicitly stated on the die whether the GeForce Maxwell chip being used is either GM204 or GM210 only the source speculates that it could be the GM210 due to the shear size of the PCB which I don't believe is a possibility. There are several reasons for this, the GPU size is relatively larger than the GK104/GK114 which were featured on the GeForce GTX 680 and GeForce GTX 770 but smaller than the GeForce Kepler GK110 which is relatively larger. A decent comparing of the GPUs was made by Videocardz which can be seen below: NVIDIA GeForce Maxwell GM204

Now some may believe that the larger die on Maxwell equates to the carte du jour using the flagship GM200/GM210 cadre only that'southward not true. As we take already seen, NVIDIA increased the die size of their Maxwell based GM107 which measured 148mm² compared to its predecessor, the GK107 which measures 118mm², then more or less this confirms that the flagship Maxwell core will exist larger than GK110 in size just more than efficient in terms of functioning and power. Much of the technical details of the 2nd generation Maxwell core or non known but some hints were given in rumors and previous reports which will be shared at the cease of this commodity. And so this but might be the GM204 core with some early phase designs to examination stability. The PCB size is something which we accept seen this generation with board manufacturers extending the width of the PCBs to add more ability components to increment stability, overclocking potential and this is generally what companies practice in ES phase.

The back of the PCB is not much interesting but I happened to find out this relatively surprising marking near on of the screw holds which mentions "256". Its difficult to say what this means but nosotros did hear a 256-chip bus being used on the GeForce GTX 880 and with a similar memory configuration as the GeForce GTX 880 on the front end, this might indeed exist a conformation for a 256-fleck coach being used on NVIDIA's latest flagship Maxwell card how-ever, its wise to await for more official and concrete specs but sometimes, speculation does turn out to be true.

The ability area on the PCB is very interesting and in one case once more, nosotros run across the GeForce GTX 680 resemblance in the stacked pin connector design. The stacked pivot connectors were officially launched with the GeForce GTX 680 but NVIDIA didn't adopt the design with their other cards, possibly due to the NVTTM being a highly efficient cooling design. These beingness featured on the PCB might merely exist an ES pattern or NVIDIA may actually be bringing this back. The surprising part is that the carte du jour makes employ of 2 6-Pin and a unmarried 8-Pin connector. This does points out to a TDP of 325W which is definitely non something NVIDIA wants to aim for on their adjacent generation GPU design which are focused and marketed for existence "highly efficient". Simply in one case again, I believe that this is just a design phase board to test stability and evaluate the carte for terminal qualification testing. The GeForce GTX 880 at near is expected to feature a TDP of around 180-225W which falls in line with their GeForce offerings during the Kepler generation, peculiarly if this is based on GM204.

The main PCB shot is pixelated blurring some very of import parts of the PCB from our eyes. There are two massive black blocks at the back of this PCB which have been mentioned to be Denver cores but Denver isn't equally massive equally the blocks being shown and they are simply cooling fans used on the PCB to cool the VRM and power components, most of which can exist seen in the back shot of the PCB. The front Brandish connectors are also blurred merely we can run across two SLI gilded fingers which ways that NVIDIA isn't ditching the good old connector style multi-GPU applied science in favor of a AMD XDMA styled design. For cooling, NVIDIA recently patented the so chosen Turbofan which is a Axial-Radial Hybrid fan blueprint similar to what MSI'south currently offering on their current Mini-ITX cards. So we might see a new cooling design on the card and details on the new centric-radial cooling fan are given below:

"The present invention provides a turbofan and a graphics card with the turbofan. The turbofan comprises: a turbofan assembly which admits air in an axial direction and dispenses air in a radial direction; an inlet fan associates disposed at an inlet of the turbofan assembly and tending coaxially with the turbofan assembly: and a driving ways for driving the turbofan assembly and the inlet fan assembly to rotate. The turbofan provided by the inventiongathers the ambient air to the inlet through the inlet fan associates tending at the inlet of the turbofan assembly, so as to modify a negative pressure state at the inlet. Consequently, the cooling efficiency of the turbofan is improved effectively and the dissonance of the turbofan is reduced." via BitsnChips

Price wise, the GeForce 800 serial would stick with the $499 U.s.a. price for the flagship and $399 US cost for the cutting-downward variant as with the first generation Kepler parts. NVIDIA will non adopt the $649 or $549 U.s. pricing which they went with the GK110 series and performance wise, the carte would exist ameliorate in both performance additionally, the ability consumption. You can derive more technical details of the GeForce Maxwell architecture from the GM107 details but it should be noted that the GeForce GTX 880 will possibly make use of the 2d generation Maxwell core. Specifications and additional details on Maxwell GeForce cards are listed below:

NVIDIA Maxwell GM107 Architecture

The NVIDIA Maxwell GM107 architecture is virtually conspicuously built from scratch yet looks like an hybrid of both Kepler and Fermi. The SMM or Streaming Multiprocessor of Maxwell will replace the SMX of Kepler and each of the smm are assembled into four blocks nevertheless are defined as office of a single SMM which means the core architecture has got quite dense with Maxwell. Each of these blocks hold 32 CUDA cores so a single SMM with four of these operation units results in 128 CUDA cores. The SMM has 128 CUDA cores compared to 192 CUDA cores on the SMX.

The GM107 GPC 'Graphics Processing Cluster' consists of five of these streaming multiprocessors which are connected to a Raster Engine. Each SMM consists of Polymorph Engine 2.0 which includes the Vertex Fetch, Tessellator, Viewport transform, attribute setup and stream output. Each SMM has viii texture mapping units which equates to 40 on the whole chip and 16 ROPs while connected to 2 64-scrap memory controllers.

There's besides a scattering of cache on Maxwell which is 2 MB in total compared to 256 KB on Kepler GK107 which reduces GPU queuing. IPCC has been increased on the GPU core and balancing improvement to workload has been done. NVIDIA has improved their H.264 encoding and decoding with NVENC on Maxwell and then that would outcome in improve performance in ShadowPlay technology and improved sleep states have been implemented to reduce power input while the GPU is running idle. All of this is packed in a die which measures 148mm^two which means transistor density has been upped by fifteen% on the same 28nm process pattern.

NVIDIA GM200.GM210 (Maxwell Architecture, High-Functioning for Telsa/Quadro Arrives afterwards for Cosnumers, Successor of GK110)
NVIDIA GM204 (Maxwell Architecture, High-End Consumer, Successor of GK104, First GeForce 800 Series Products likely to characteristic)
NVIDIA GM206 (Maxwell Architecture, Performance Minded, Successor of GK206, Mid-Range GeForce 800 Series products to characteristic)
NVIDIA GM107/207 (Maxwell Architecture, Entry Level, Successor of GK107, Entry Level GeForce 800/700 Series To feature, Already introduced on GTX 750 Ti / GTX 750)

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NVIDIA GeForce GTX 880 Specifications (Speculated):

	GeForce GTX 480	GeForce GTX 580	GeForce GTX 680	GeForce GTX 780	GeForce GTX 780 Ti	GeForce GTX 880
Codename	GF100	GF110	GK104	GK110	GK110	GM204
Process	40nm	40nm	28nm	28nm	28nm	28nm
GPU Core	Fermi	Fermi	Kepler	Kepler	Kepler	Maxwell
Memory	1.five GB	1.v GB	2 GB	iii GB	3 GB / 6 GB	4-8 GB
Memory Bus	384-Chip	384-Bit	256-bit	384-Bit	384-Flake	256-bit
Launch	March 26th 2022	November 09 2022	March 22nd 2022	May 23rd 2022	December 2022	September 2022
Price	$499 Usa	$499 United states	$499 US	$499 US	$699 US	$549 The states