A hot potato of a GPU: PNY has announced passively cooled versions of the Nvidia Quadro RTX 8000 and 6000, which are two of Nvidia’s largest and hottest cards with 4,608 CUDA cores and 295W TDPs. At $6,000 and $4,000 respectively, that’s an expensive pair of space heaters.
PNY claims the two new GPUs, which share a core count and boost clock, only sacrifice a little bit of performance to achieve a passively coolable 250W TDP. I’ve never heard of 250W being passively cooled within a standard 2-slot form factor, but there’s a first time for everything. Particularly if you own a wind tunnel.
The boost clock has been lowered by 8% down to a still very respectable 1,620 MHz, and the base clocks have been dropped by about 12%. The memory clock has also received a small hit of 7% to bring it from 14 Gbps to 13 Gbps.
Quadro RTX 8000 | Quadro RTX 8000 Passive | Quadeo RTX 6000 | Quadro RTX 6000 Passive | |
CUDA Cores | 4608 | 4608 | 4608 | 4608 |
Base Clock | 1395 MHz | 1230 MHz | 1440 MHz | 1275 MHz |
Boost Clock | 1770 MHz | 1620 MHz | 1770 MHz | 1620 MHz |
Single-Precision | 16.3 TFLOPS | 14.9 TFLOPS | 16.3 TFLOPS | 14.9 TFLOPS |
RT Cores | 72 | 72 | 72 | 72 |
RTX-OPS | 84T | 80T | 80T | 80T |
Tensor Cores | 576 | 576 | 576 | 576 |
Mixed Matrix | 130.5 TFLOPS | 119.4 TFLOPS | 130.5 TFLOPS | 119.4 TFLOPS |
Memory Capacity | 48 GB GDDR6 | 48 GB GDDR6 | 24 GB GDDR6 | 24 GB GDDR6 |
Memory Clock | 14 Gbps | 13 Gbps | 14 Gbps | 13 Gbps |
Memory Bandwidth | 672 GB/s | 624 GB/s | 672 GB/s | 624 GB/s |
TDP | 295W | 250W | 295W | 250W |
All jokes aside, these cards still need air blown across the heat spreaders by system fans, like the ones in leaf blowers -- ok, so I lied about setting the jokes aside -- that makes them server rack only, so PNY has removed their usual display ports.
Despite potentially increased operating temperatures, PNY is offering its regular three-year limited warranty.
The Quadro RTX 8000 Passive and Quadro RTX 6000 Passive are presently for sale to commercial customers, with a public release expected sometime soon. Pricing has not been disclosed.
https://www.techspot.com/news/83722-nvidia-6000-quadro-rtx-8000-can-now-passively.html