HOW IS A VIDEO CARD MADE? FROM VRM TO VRAM, THE ANATOMY OF A GPU

Before embarking on what for many represents the most difficult challenge in the world of assembly, namely the choice of components, it is necessary to take a step back and try to acquire the necessary tools to know how to " read " the technical data sheet of a video card. .

In fact, in the GPU market there is a very strong heterogeneity which however allows us, with due care, to really be able to choose the right one for our pockets and our configuration.

We often hear about " graphics cards for FullHD at 60 FPS "marketingmediaweb     or " GPUs for 30 FPS in 4K.", extreme simplifications which, however, render the concept quite well. Each video card currently on the market has in fact specifications that make them more or less adequate to perform a certain type of work.

ARE GPU AND VIDEO CARD THE SAME THING?

The first aspect to be explored concerns precisely this acronym, very often used improperly to mean something that is not. To be clear, the GPU is not a video card just as a CPU is not a computer. As mentioned in our previous study , the GPU is the beating heart of a video card but it does not constitute the whole . A video card is in fact a small system, separate and separable from a computer, which houses inside a series of fundamental components divinebeautytips    capable of communicating with each other in order to obtain an output, or video signal.

The GPU is the beating heart of the video card, consisting as a whole of a printed circuit, a graphics processor, VRAM, VRMs and the actual power supply, in addition to the video outputs and a communication channel with the PC consisting of the PCI Express port.

THE GPU

The GPU, or Graphics Processing Unit, is to the nanobiztech    video card what the processor is to a PC. But a certain amount of caution is needed before venturing into comparisons as easy as they are distant. CPU and GPU are profoundly different in architecture, function and potential .

The fundamental difference lies precisely in the architecture. A CPU is an extremely performing computer, capable of hosting a limited techcrunchblog     number of cores, which in turn are made up of billions of transistors. The cores of a processor are limited in number but capable of executing extremely complex instructions in series. The potential of a CPU is in fact expressed in the profound heterogeneity of complex tasks it can perform and not in the amount of calculations it is able to perform simultaneously. This is instead what characterizes the GPU.

A graphics processor differs from a CPU in that globalmarketingbusiness   it has an innumerable number of tiny cores. In modern GPUs the most adequate scale is that of several thousand cores,able to perform simple and repetitive calculations, in parallel and at very high speeds . In the latest generation of NVIDIA GPUs, these small computers are called CUDA Core. In AMD graphics processors, on the other hand, the compute units are called Stream Processors. The two terms, however, are not interchangeable and comparable.

It will therefore be quite useless to compare the number and frequency of the Stream Processors of an AMD GPU with the CUDA Cores of NVIDIA, because they completely differ in architecture. For this reason, in recent years the manufacturers have begun to use, and sometimes abuse, another unit of measurement, certainly more functional for the purpose, but which does not necessarily represent a

litmus test : we are talking about FLOPS, or the quantity. of floating point operations per second (FLOPS) a processor is capable of.

VRAM

Performing many calculations per second is therefore the raison d'être of a graphics processor, which requires this particular specialization to animate every single pixel of our monitors with hundreds of frames.

To make the visual experience as fluid and complex at the same time, the GPU needs a space to temporarily allocate a part of the calculations it is able to perform.

For this reason, a video card is equipped with a variable amount of VRAM memory, which has multiple purposes. First of all is precisely that of framebuffer , that is a transit area in which information already processed and destined for video output is stored .

The other essential function of VRAM is that ofpreload portions of the graphic material useful for final processing , such as the textures of a game.

The question at this point arises: is it possible to say that it is the VRAM and not the GPU that affects the performance of the video card? The answer is obviously no. Over the years VRAM has become a real workhorse in marketing campaigns. In reality, this value, in order to be useful in a way that is consistent with its potential, needs a calculation capacity that is supportive of it . In most cases, in fact, it is the manufacturer itself to insert an amount of VRAM memory adequate to the capabilities of the GPU.  techbizcenter

The VRMs

Acronym for Voltage Regulator Module, VRMs are small power systems that limit and stabilize the flow of current from the main power supply, so as not to damage the video card.

The VRMs are made up of three different structures, which cooperate with each other to obtain the final result. MOSFETs are the first element in this "cascade". They are interposed between the main power supply and the rest of the components of the board and have the task of supplying the current at the voltage required by the GPU. The Chokes in turn have the purpose of stabilizing the output current and finally there are the capacitors, small cylindrical structures responsible for collecting the current, like small tanks, and for the subsequent final introduction into the circuit, in order to eliminate or limit the as possible any voltage fluctuations.

Inbound and outbound communication

Once all the rendering and rasterization operations have been completed , the image is sent to the final device, the monitor. For this reason, in the portion that faces the outside of the case we will find a plethora of video outputs. In modern graphics cards we will mainly find a combination of HDMI and DisplayPort outputs.

The video card is a device that allows the externalization of some specific calculations outside the main processor. Current technologies allow fast and efficient communication with the rest of the system thanks to the PCI Express standard.

Currently arriving at iteration 4.0, the intergenerational differences concern the data transfer speed and the bandwidth of the bandwidth. To give you an example, PCI Express 3.0 standard supports 8GB / s transfer speed and 32GB / s bandwidth , while modern 4.0 channels come with 16GB / s speed and 64GB / s bandwidth. .

As astronomical as they may seem, in reality there are extremely few devices able to settle for a single communication channel, such as some sound cards. There are numerous PCI Express ports of different sizes on all motherboards. Each PCI Express slot will communicate a peripheral with the motherboard chipset or directly with the CPU with a specified number of PCIe channels. Specifically, modern video cards will communicate through an x16 slot , which is made up of sixteen PCIe channels.

The dissipation system

The aesthetic artifice, as we know, is at the total discretion of the user. Many times, however, it is good to try not to have the pill gilded by a particularly aggressive body or a handful of LEDs . In fact, it is necessary to pay particular attention to what lies behind the dissipation system.

Some manufacturers also add liquid-dissipated video cards to their lineup with all-in-one systems or with waterblock to be inserted inside a Custom Loop. The performance of these solutions is notoriously excellent.

The vast majority of video cards, on the other hand, have traditional air cooling. In this area too, a distinction needs to be made. In fact, there are Blower type heatsinks , less and less present on the market, and Open-Air heatsinks .

Blower-type video cards feature a single tangential fan, placed at the opposite end of the board with respect to the video outputs, as its function is to capture air from the surrounding environment and push it longitudinally through the metal dissipation channels, to cool them and allow the heated air to escape through the holes ports located near the HDMI and DisplayPort ports. The usefulness of these systems lies in the fact that, in conditions of limited airflow , they do not introduce heat inside the case or they do it in a limited way. The other side of the coin is that they will be slightly "warmer" than Open-Air systems.

Most of the custom video cards, but now also the reference cards of AMD and NVIDIA, have an open-type cooling system, recognizable by the presence of multiple fans on the body, whose function is to introduce larger volumes into the heatsink of fresh air, for better dissipation, while dispersing the heat in the surrounding environment . Overall, a slight increase in system temperatures may be observed, but with good airflow there should be no particular limitations. Unlike blower systems, the greater volume of air in this case allows the GPU to work at much lower temperatures .

A thoughtful choice

The choice of ideal components requires essential theoretical foundations. Being able to understand the system you want to assemble can be a particularly complex knot to solve, but if we know how to choose the right video card, tune the rest of the components synergistically will be child's play .

On the contrary, if we already have a monitor and a partially configured system available, knowing how to choose the right video card for our system will allow us to invest the right capital , especially in a context like the current one, where supplies are extremely limited. or if you have a small budget available.