You can rely on that we will be hearing many high octane news during this “Computex week” and one of the most interesting so far is something Anandtech has come across. In conversations with power supply manufactuerrs they’ve found out that ATI and NVIDIA have started to send out specifications or at least guidelines for the power requirements of the next generaion of graphics circuits. It’s ATI’s R600 and NVIDIA’s G80 circuits they’te talking about, both DirectX 10 capable. The information the PSU manufacturers have received about ATI and NVIDIA’s circuits is that the cards could consume from at max 130W up to an amazing 300W per card.
Considering that the high-end cards of today consum at “best” 150W (not overclocked of course) and that there is already a problem with cooling these hot circuits we have a hard time seeing how you would handle the heat coming from a 300W graphics card. This has resulted in that graphics card manufacturers have taken a closer look into the possibilities of using water cooling with these high-end graphcis cards, something that sounds like an effective solution, yet expensive one.
In the end, we should be able to expect a lot more 1000-1200W PSUs soon and most likely more focus on VGA power supply units which we’ve already seen a few. Among others, OCZ has displayed a 300W VGA PSU at Computex whcih like other models are installed in a free 5.25″ slot.
