Friday, 09 December 2011 15:40
AMD Tahiti needs 8-pin and 6-pin power connectors
Written by Slobodan Simic
For both HD 7950 and HD 7970
We've been fed whispers that indicate final versions of Tahiti based cards, known for now as the HD 7950 and the HD 7970, will both feature 8-pin and 6-pin PCI-Express power connectors.
If you do some simple math this means that the HD 7970 will have a maximum power draw under 300W while the HD 7950 will need more than 225W. The PCI-Express motherboard slot offers up to 75W of power, 6-pin adds another 75W and 8-pin can pump 150W of power. This is a pretty strange move as the HD 6950 ended below 225W and thus needed only two 6-pin PCI-E power connectors but that will apparently change with the HD 7900 series.
The recently pixellized Tahiti cards both had 8-pin solders, but it was expected considering we were looking at ES type cards. According to what we know so far, AMD advises a ~500W PSU for the Radeon HD 7970 and that is 100W less than what Nvidia asks for the GTX 580 and somewhere around the GTX 560 Ti. This can be cosidered a great improvement if the rumoured performance turns out to be true.
Of course, these are still rumours but we are sure that we'll have official details pretty soon as we draw closer to the rumored January 10th launch date.
Latest from Slobodan Simic