People tend to confuse VRM to VRam (and do that many times and in many threads), so I'm just making a new topic to make it a bit more clear.
Nothing personal, but its a bit irritating at times
So lets start with the easy part. VRam -
These are the little memory chips attached to our GPUs, and the amount of them and side, decide how much memory the GPU has.
Today, each chip contains 125MB of storage.
Meaning if you have 12 of those (Like the GTX 580), you get 1.53GB of storage.
Same with the 570. You have 12 of those, so we get 1.28GB (yeah yeah, don't yell. 125MB = 1024*125).
So this has been cleared.
Now VRM -
VRM is short cut to Voltage regulator module.
This, is what deliver the power to our GPU.
These little thingies, convert the power from the PSU, to a much lower volt in order to keep the GPU in safe working volts.
To simplify, each VRM, receives the 12V from the PSU, cut it, and deliver a much lower volt, around the 1V, to the PSU.
Now that is a lot of work for just one little VRM now is it?
So what nvidia and amd did, was put more VRMs in order to share that load.
Like instead of making one guy lift a 2 ton car, ask 10 guys to do it together.
So lets look at the GPUs of today:
The 580:
The 570:
And the 590:
(Thanks to google for finding me the pictures from various places
).
If you look closely, you will see that:
The 580 has 6 VRM regulators.
The 570 has 4 VRM regulators (Its the same PCB with less VRM and Vram).
The 590 has 10 VRM regulators (jumbled around it, 5 per GPU).
To this means, that in order to deliver the max 1.2V per GPU, the 580 has the least work done needed per VRM. It has 6, they are strong, buffy, and can take up almost everything.
On the other hand, the 570 only has 4. So they have to work harder, stressed out, and in the end, one of them will cave over the weight of work, say "**** that, I'm out of here!", and blow itself up, taking the whole card with it.
The 590, has 5 VRM per GPU.
So it can go somewhere in between, but in the end, it won't match the strength of the 580, and if you push it too hard, you will blow a VRM, and the card is gone.
Now protection to the VRMs, comes in nvidia from the drivers (if I'm not mistaken, amd put that in the GPU bios, which imo is better).
The protection protects the VRMs from blowing up before they stress out.
The protection usually, doesn't need to kick in when playing, but in benchmarking, it does.
There is a way to remove that protection using GPU-Z, but I don't recommend it unless you know what you are doing
And that's it, long, but hope you enjoy reading it
For any spelling mistakes, I appologise befor-hend (
).
Nothing personal, but its a bit irritating at times
So lets start with the easy part. VRam -
These are the little memory chips attached to our GPUs, and the amount of them and side, decide how much memory the GPU has.
Today, each chip contains 125MB of storage.
Meaning if you have 12 of those (Like the GTX 580), you get 1.53GB of storage.
Same with the 570. You have 12 of those, so we get 1.28GB (yeah yeah, don't yell. 125MB = 1024*125).
So this has been cleared.
Now VRM -
VRM is short cut to Voltage regulator module.
This, is what deliver the power to our GPU.
These little thingies, convert the power from the PSU, to a much lower volt in order to keep the GPU in safe working volts.
To simplify, each VRM, receives the 12V from the PSU, cut it, and deliver a much lower volt, around the 1V, to the PSU.
Now that is a lot of work for just one little VRM now is it?
So what nvidia and amd did, was put more VRMs in order to share that load.
Like instead of making one guy lift a 2 ton car, ask 10 guys to do it together.
So lets look at the GPUs of today:
The 580:
The 570:
And the 590:
(Thanks to google for finding me the pictures from various places
If you look closely, you will see that:
The 580 has 6 VRM regulators.
The 570 has 4 VRM regulators (Its the same PCB with less VRM and Vram).
The 590 has 10 VRM regulators (jumbled around it, 5 per GPU).
To this means, that in order to deliver the max 1.2V per GPU, the 580 has the least work done needed per VRM. It has 6, they are strong, buffy, and can take up almost everything.
On the other hand, the 570 only has 4. So they have to work harder, stressed out, and in the end, one of them will cave over the weight of work, say "**** that, I'm out of here!", and blow itself up, taking the whole card with it.
The 590, has 5 VRM per GPU.
So it can go somewhere in between, but in the end, it won't match the strength of the 580, and if you push it too hard, you will blow a VRM, and the card is gone.
Now protection to the VRMs, comes in nvidia from the drivers (if I'm not mistaken, amd put that in the GPU bios, which imo is better).
The protection protects the VRMs from blowing up before they stress out.
The protection usually, doesn't need to kick in when playing, but in benchmarking, it does.
There is a way to remove that protection using GPU-Z, but I don't recommend it unless you know what you are doing
And that's it, long, but hope you enjoy reading it
For any spelling mistakes, I appologise befor-hend (