10 YEARS of NVIDIA Video Cards Compared!
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2018-05-06
·
1,974 words · ~9 min read
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Now, as most of you probably know, NVIDIA acquired our company back in
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early Q2 of 2016. So, you can imagine
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how upset our Emerald overlords were when we decided to test 10 years worth
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of AMD video cards before giving the
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green team the same treatment. Well, we
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finally put out the fire in our server room and just in time to bring you the
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other side of the GPU performance coin.
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Welcome to NVIDIA video cards through
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the
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ages. Rockat's Plus Force FX features
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pressure sensitive QWES as keys which
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can be configured in three different modes for multiple functions. Check it
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out now at the link below. This is going to be a long video, so let's get right
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into it. We used a 5960X test bench with
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64 gigs of DDR4 RAM to isolate the
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performance of the graphics cards. And we used the same benchmarks as AMD GPUs
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through the ages for consistency. First up is NVIDIA's ancient flagship, the
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8800 GTX. This card was freaking
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revolutionary. It brought us an all new architecture called Tesla in the biggest
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chip we had ever seen in a GPU code name
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G80. It was built on the same 90mm
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process node as its predecessor G71, but
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was over twice as big with almost 2 and
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1/2 times as many transistors devoted to
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gaming performance, enabling new DirectX
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10 features like SM 4.0 0 and a reduction in API overhead. CUDA, which
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is still very much in use today and enabled developers to run generalpurpose
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code on the graphics chip and the ability to run three cards at once in
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SLI, which isn't to say that its standalone performance wasn't impressive
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in its own right. G80 with its 768 megs
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of GDDR3 RAM on a wide 384-bit bus
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smacked around even two of NVIDIA's
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previous flagships in SLI. And all of
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that for a measly $100 more, which almost makes me feel better about the
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cash grab 8800 Ultra that they released 6 months later for $230 more that was
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basically the same thing with a fancy plastic shroud on it. The GeForce 8800
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GT wasn't strictly speaking a new
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flagship, but rather a weird Tesla
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architecture refresh. It was the first built by NVIDIA on TSMC's shiny new 65
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nanometer process. This node shrink allowed NVIDIA to drop power consumption
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by 60 watts, reduce the die size, and
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actually bump up the transistor count at the same time. a modest increase that
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you guessed it. No, actually you probably didn't. The 8800 GT was on par
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or slower than its predecessor almost
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across the board due to its narrower memory bus and 16 fewer shader units.
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Where people got excited was the price.
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8800 GT was less than half the price of
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8800 GTX. It was single slot, enabling
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MATX users to run to an SLI with additional expansion cards, and it also
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featured an onchip display engine.
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Finally, it was the first consumer GPU with a PCI Express 2.0 interface, which
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still to this day is barely saturated by
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flagship graphics cards. The last flagship silicon before NVIDIA
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transitioned to the GTX insert three numbers and maybe a couple letters here
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nomenclature was G92, the beating heart
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of the 9800 GTX Plus, a skew that
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lowered NVIDIA's cost and bumped up performance over the architecturally
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identical 9800 GTX by shrinking from 65
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to 55 nm and boosting up the clock
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speed. Now we get to the GTX 280. Yes,
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we know it actually came out before that last one I was talking about, but deal
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with it. So, forget everything we said earlier about 55 nanmter. The 280 built
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on the mature 65nm process had a massive
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576 mm die with 1.4 billion transistors.
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And to put that insanity in context,
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AMD's closest competitor, the 4870 had a
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measly 959 million. And further driving up
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complexity, it shipped with a minimum of 1 Gigabyte of graphics memory on a huge
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512bit bus, something NVIDIA hasn't done
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before or since on a consumer card. The
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good news is that it absolutely crushed their previous generation efforts, even
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delivering ample performance for stereoscopic 3D gaming, a big push for
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NVIDIA at that time. We'll skip over the 300 series because all of these were
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just crappy rebrands for notebooks and Best Buy PCs, meaning that the next real
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GPU in line is the GTX 480 based on the
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then all-new and now infamous Fermy
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architecture. This was NVIDIA's first
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swing at DirectX11 support, which is still widely used today. And this is
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becoming a bit of a common theme. But while the new 40nm process allowed it to
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be smaller than the GTX 280, it was still huge with a 529 millimeter die, a
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wamping 3 billion transistors, and
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support for DDDR5 memory, which again is
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still widely used today. Interesting
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fact, NVIDIA apparently thought it performed so well not just in gaming but
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also in compute which was a big focus for Fermy that the largest configuration
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of GF100 silicon never actually made its
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way into a shipping product. Or maybe that was due to power constraints. Cuz
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uh yeah, even with the theoretical
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efficiency advantage of a smaller node, the 480 was such a barbecue that NVIDIA
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provided a convenient grill on the face of the card to cook your eggs. Our next
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contestant is the GTX 580, and it
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featured an optimized and fully enabled Fermy dubbed GF 110. We've got most of
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the usual improvements here. more VRAMm, higher clock speeds, and a slightly
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smaller die, but nothing as exciting as video card cooking, which we mean in a
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good way. 580 performed noticeably better than 480 while also managing
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lower temperatures, noise, and power consumption. It was kind of like the GTX
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480S, if that makes sense to the Apple fans out there. In the seventh corner of
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our showdown, this must be a weird looking ring. We have the GTX 680. Ah,
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yes. Goodbye Fermy. Hello Kepler. A lot
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of things changed here. 4K 60 Hz output
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was enabled via DisplayPort 1.2. PCI
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Express 3.0 burst onto the scene with double the bandwidth of version two. The
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die size shrunk way down to 294 mm. And
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the GDDR5 got kicked up a notch to 6 GHz
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thanks to a newly redesigned memory controller. Finally, we got it. Wait a
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minute. We dropped down to a 256 bit
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bus. Hold on a sec. Look at that code
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name. NVIDIA top tier chips usually end
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in a zero. Well, what they did was they
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used AMD's complacency and a new 28nmter
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process along with some dynamic power tricks called GPU Boost to crank up
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performance so much that they gave us a
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stepdown chip as a replacement for a top
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tier one to save a buck and still manage to make it look like an upgrade. Not
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that they passed any of those savings to the consumer. It was priced at $500,
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same as the GTX 580. Though, I guess at least we got hardware H.264 encoding for
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game stream and Shadow Play, G-Sync variable refresh rate technology, and
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support for the Vulcan API. Now, the
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next logical stop in our journey might seem like GTX 780, but in February 2013,
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NVIDIA kicked convention and logic in the head with a Titan card based on the
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chip that might have been GTX 680 in a
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parallel universe where AMD had been keeping up, but instead it turned into
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780 and then 780 Ti. So, we're going to
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go with that since it was kind of the final form of the GK 110. Now, not much
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changed product or feature-wise here.
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Big Kepler was a much bigger, much
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better 680 with a 90% bigger die, more
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than double the transistors at a whopping 7 billion, and a $699 price tag
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to go with it. Ouch. At least though,
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this amounted to a sizable bump in performance over last generation's 680
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in basically every application. In another unconventional move, NVIDIA
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completely skipped over 800 series and went straight to 900. So, even though
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the 980 and the 980 Ti were 9 months
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apart, we're going to bunch them together cuz apparently that's what
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everybody's doing. So, the 900 series was actually based on the same 28nm
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process as Kepler. Shrinking silicon got
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a lot harder in the early 2010s, but 2
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years later, we were due for some kind of performance improvement. So, NVIDIA's
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engineers brought us Maxwell. These GPUs
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feature an integrated ARM CPU, which according to NVIDIA provides more
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independence from a given systems primary CPU. The 980, again a step down
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chip in big kid clothes, performs a little better than the Kepler GTX 780
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Ti, which is an impressive feat. But the
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big story is efficiency. It boasts an 85
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watt lower TDP. The 980 Ti was a bit of
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a different story, though. It rocked 8 billion transistors, an unheard of 601
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square millimeter die, NVIDIA's biggest ever, 6 gigs of VRAM, and all the API
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support you could ever want, except maybe DirectX12, depending on who you
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ask. While Maxwell was marketed as fully
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DirectX12 capable, the developer of Ashes of the Singularity, Oxide Games,
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found that Maxwell cards performed very poorly with Async compute enabled, which
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is kind of a big deal. So, all of this amounted to an astonishing performance
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improvement considering the lack of process node change, and HDMI 2.0
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support was a nice touch. Finally, we arrive at the modern day.
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The GTX 1080 and 1080 Ti based on the
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Pascal architecture. 10 series GPUs have
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brought a lot to the table, including GDDR 5X at the top end, which increased
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memory speeds to up to 10 GHz. Multiple
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DisplayPort 1.4 four ports for 8K and
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high refresh 4K monitor support, high
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bandwidth SLI bridges, not to mention the elimination of 3-way and 4-way SLI
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for gaming, and the smallest manufacturing node yet, 16 nanmter. 1080
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launched in May of 2016 with 7.2 billion
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transistors. And this is becoming a pattern now, a small performance
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improvement over the 980 Ti. Then 1080
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Ti followed with a much more substantial
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bump. One of the biggest stories here though was really compute. Pascal was
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designed to be a compute powerhouse with
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the top tier GP100 chip going actually
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unused in gaming products. So 1080 Ti
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and its Titan analog were instead based
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on GP 102, a new in between tier.
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The ingenious EWS 360AP is an enterprise
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class dualband access point that's ideal for large offices, schools, and
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hospitality guest Wi-Fi access. It features AC speeds with business class
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features and operates in autonomous or managed modes. It's got a 3x3 antenna
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design and a high-owered radio and comes with a free management software called
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Easy Master. You can manage anywhere from one access point to thousands. And
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there are no per device license fees. So
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that means no annual subscription, which is great for keeping the total cost of
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ownership down. Check it and other ingenious products out over at their
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website through the link in the video
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description. Thanks for watching NVIDIA GPUs through the ages. If this video
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sucked, you know what to do. But if it was awesome, get subscribed, hit the like button, or check out the link to
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where to buy the stuff we featured in the video description. Also linked down
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there is our merch store, which has cool shirts like this one, and our community
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forum, which you should totally join.