what the Size Happened?

[fightingfi]

back in the ole days of the 90's and 00's video cards had SMALL fans on these huge die chips 9700xt 8800 gt's and nowadays you have these TINY chips with these HUGE 120x2 fans and water blocks when the ole days we had like 92 mm fans on these cards what the size happened over the yrs how did we get so big with cards today and why?

 

[faugusztin]

Power usage increased. Radeon 9700 was 37W TDP. 8800GT was 125W TDP. Current cards are usually between 150 and 300W TDP.
Also people prefer quieter cards.

Both of those factors require bigger coolers, which can be cooled quieter and/or can keep a GPU with higher TDP at reasonable temperatures.

 

[GreenOrbs]

I'm glad we moved to bigger beefier coolers with bigger fans and fin stacks. Small high RPM fans tend to be terrible for noise. These days most good GPUs don't even spin up at idle due to bigger size of the heat sink and some are very quiet even at full tilt.

 

[Deleted member 89018]

Yep, all down to power use. If you look at a card today that only uses 40-50w like the one Radeon 550 cards, gtx 1030, or lower end workstation GPUs like wx 2100/3100, quadro p620 you’ll see they use heat sinks similar in size to cards from back then.

we didn’t have 250W video cards back in those days. We barely had 250W computers.

 

[FlawleZ]

Additionally transistor density has increased dramatically. This requires bigger and better cooling.

 

[fightingfi]

so as move into the future with technology its going to get BIGGER and consume more power? and yet here is amd working on 5nm i cant imagine how H U G E the fans will for it 200 mm?

 

[pippenainteasy]

Power usage increased. Radeon 9700 was 37W TDP. 8800GT was 125W TDP. Current cards are usually between 150 and 300W TDP.
Also people prefer quieter cards.

Both of those factors require bigger coolers, which can be cooled quieter and/or can keep a GPU with higher TDP at reasonable temperatures.

The "quiet" part is also extremely important. Back in the early 2000s people had 60mm delta screamer fans and you could hear a PC from a mile away. These days the expectation is for a quieter PC.

 

[faugusztin]

so as move into the future with technology its going to get BIGGER and consume more power? and yet here is amd working on 5nm i cant imagine how H U G E the fans will for it 200 mm?

GPU power usage is peaking around 300W for a decade by now, also going to smaller node size usually means decreased voltage. There are also physical limits to how big GPUs can be, so the coolers you see now is probably the peak size you will see until GPUs change their form factor completely.

 

[Grebuloner]

I think there's more of a disconnect between cooler size and TDP these days. I know cards are big and power-hungry, but the near universal move to triple slot coolers on the mid- to high-end is really annoying. Even <75W cards still get dual- and triple-slots! We did just fine with 2-slot models and huge TDPs. If my OCd 980ti (280W at factory OC, we all went higher of course) could do fine and reasonably quiet with 2, why can't a 175W 2060? Why does a 75W 1650 need 3?

 

[Deleted member 89018]

Well where else are they going to put all the RGB bling?

@op you have to figure that a card rated at 50w today is significantly more capable than one rated at 50w from 15 years ago. The smaller process allows for improvements in power use but designs have also increased the available power budget. If we were capped at like 75w for gpu power they’d still be faster than 75w cards of old, but now we can make them bigger and faster than we could 15 years ago, and that’s how we get 12tflop video cards.

 

[Armenius]

back in the ole days of the 90's and 00's video cards had SMALL fans on these huge die chips 9700xt 8800 gt's and nowadays you have these TINY chips with these HUGE 120x2 fans and water blocks when the ole days we had like 92 mm fans on these cards what the size happened over the yrs how did we get so big with cards today and why?

"Huge"

9700 XT = 218mm²
8800 GT = 324mm²
2080 Ti = 754mm²

More important is transistor density, along with power consumption as already said. More power = more heat, and the more densely packed the transistors the more quickly you want to dissipate that heat.

9700 XT = 504,588 transistors/mm²
8800 GT = 2,327,161 transistors/mm²
2080 Ti = 24,668,436 transistors/mm²
5700 XT = 41,035,857 transistors/mm²

I think there's more of a disconnect between cooler size and TDP these days. I know cards are big and power-hungry, but the near universal move to triple slot coolers on the mid- to high-end is really annoying. Even <75W cards still get dual- and triple-slots! We did just fine with 2-slot models and huge TDPs. If my OCd 980ti (280W at factory OC, we all went higher of course) could do fine and reasonably quiet with 2, why can't a 175W 2060? Why does a 75W 1650 need 3?

OEM coolers are still 2 slots wide. NVIDIA cards are doing well with the new dual fan 2-slot design on Turing cards.

 

[Centauri]

Kinda makes you wonder what would have been possible in the 9800 XT days if the engineers had been allowed to engineer for PCBs and coolers the size of today's.

 

[Sycraft]

so as move into the future with technology its going to get BIGGER and consume more power? and yet here is amd working on 5nm i cant imagine how H U G E the fans will for it 200 mm?

Probably not. Cards kept getting more power hungry and getting larger coolers as a result for quite a few years. It was an easy way to get gains. However it reached a point around 2010ish where it was getting to be more than people were willing to deal with. If they kept going up a 2 slot cooler might not be enough, even more extra PSU connections would be needed, etc. So things have plateaued for some time and while some cards use more some use less, they aren't really creeping up any more.