nVidia replies to the 7800 GTX secret overclock

We recently reported on information that stated that nVidia’s flagship GeForce 7800 GTX overlocks depending on what applications the card is working with. The fact that nVidia has chosen not to reveal this to the public has made many question its true purpose. At Bit-tech they have had a chat with nVidia and have now published a preview of the interview. Several of the answers regarding the 7800-series frequencies are very interesting and why they’ve chosen to keep it a secret got even more apparent.

The technology is according to nVidia a derivate from its mobile circuits where low power consumption and heat dissipation is extremely important. The 6800-series devours power and thus it dissipates a lot of heat, a situation nVidia wanted to avoid with its next generation circuit.

“The chip was designed from the ground up to use less power. In doing that, we used a lot of tricks that we learned from doing mobile parts. The clock speeds within the chip are dynamic – if you were watching them with an oscilloscope, you’d see the speeds going up and down all the time, as different parts of the chip come under load.”

NVIDIA has simply made the G70-circuit so that it only uses the parts that are actually necessary at a certain moment. Apparently the circuit has more than 3 different internal frequencies, all to optimize the performance but at the same time not consume unnecessary amounts of power. The reason for marketing the circuit with a frequncy at 430MHz is according to nVidia beause it didn’t want to use overrated numbers, despite that this is only one of several internal frequencies.

This has been kept secret within the company and the highest priority has been not letting ATi know of this for them to make their own version of this efficient arcitecture. But we pressume that ATi has at least a few trumps up its sleeve, alas we will now until R520 is launched, rumoured to be some time next month.

:: Read on at Bit-Tech