Could someone explain everything about graphics cards?

[Cleeecooo]

All in the title. Some of the questions I have are:

What is a passively cooled card?
What are VRM chips?
What are shader clocks?
What is the yield?

Could you also explain everything about cores please, thanks.

Please keep it as simple as possible, thanks.

 

[stulid]

Passively cooled card does not have a fan, just a very large chunk of metal.

VRM chips are the voltage regulators that take the 12V and spread it about to other chips and keep the voltage nice and steady and ripple free.

Shader clocks are the frequency in MHZ of the Shader cores within the GPU chip.

Yield is how many chips the manufacturing plant can get from a silicon wafer.

 

[Cleeecooo]

Passively cooled card does not have a fan, just a very large chunk of metal.

VRM chips are the voltage regulators that take the 12V and spread it about to other chips and keep the voltage nice and steady and ripple free.

Shader clocks are the frequency in MHZ of the Shader cores within the GPU chip.

Yield is how many chips the manufacturing plant can get from on silicon wafer.

thanks for the quick reply, but what are all the different core eg. shader, the amount of core (like a 5750 has 720)

 

[stulid]

thanks for the quick reply, but what are all the different core eg. shader, the amount of core (like a 5750 has 720)

The number of cores vary from chip to chip and maker to maker, ATI/AMD and Nvidia all count them differently, you cant compare 200 Nvidia Shaders VS 200 ATI shaders, but you can compare within the same model family, such as GTX470 shader amount VS GTX480 shader amount, not taking into account different operating MHZ

 

[Cleeecooo]

Thanks. So shader cores are the way of measuring the processing core?

 

[stulid]

In the old days before DirectX10, the graphic chips use to have individual Vertex and Pixel shaders, these could only do what they were designed for, so some times they did nothing while other parts of the chip were busy.

Then Nvidia/ATi etc started doing Unified shaders that could anything, so that none were left not doing anything, as they could be assigned to any task this boosted performance.

 

[Cleeecooo]

Thanks for all your help