What do you mean by TDP in terms of graphic card?

**Ankit Pawar** · 25-04-2012

Well I read somewhere TDP of ATI HD 4890 is 190 Watt. Can you tell me what does it mean? Also let me know about the meaning of TDP as well. I am wondering that TDP seems to be associated with power consumption. If I am incorrect then correct about the same. I am waiting for the prompt replies of yours in this particular situation. Thanks a lot in advance.

**Bageshri27** · 25-04-2012

After going through the requirement of yours I wanted tell you that the terms TDP stands for Thermal Design Power. You can also refer as Thermal Design Point. It means that maximum amount of power and cooling system which is supposed to needed to dissipate. If you consider a laptop then it could be design for 20Watt TDP and it means that laptop will be able to dissipate 20 watts of heat without crossing maximum junction temperature for the chip installed. you will be able to do the same by making use of below mentioned cooling methods.
Convection
Thermal Radiation
Conduction.
Normally combination of any of above mentioned methods are implemented. Simply TDP does not mean that maximum amount of power which can be drawn by chip rather the maximum amount of power which can be drawn by application which is running on the system. it takes care of the computer is able to handle the applications which would exceed thermal envelope and it would need cooling system for maximum amount of power theoretically possible.

In many situation TDP seems to under-estimated and it gets exceeded and it would cause system failure or sometimes it supposed to throttle speed. As far as I know most of chips are supposed to cause therm-trip when there is catastrophic cooling failure. It seems to be difficult to compared the TDP values which are associated with the different kind of manufacturer. Chip with having TDP of 100 Watt will be able to make use of more power at full load rather than that of chip having 10 W TD. low-end models are using less amount of power as compare to higher end chips.

**Amy_i3** · 25-04-2012

Additionally I wanted tell you that it is maximum amount of energy which supposed to be dissipated with stock speeds and voltages. If you are going to increase the total amount of power consumption then there would be increment in the heat output as well. so if you are trying to keep the cooling system following TDP to then it might not be worthy. According to me it is not a standard method so it is no necessary that GPU or CPU are under 100% load. After doing lots of research work I have figured out that AMD has managed to measure their TDP under 100% load for the CPU which they are manufacturing. As far as Intel is concerned they are having totally different approach and they are supposed to measure their TDP on the basis of average usage of CPU over the time. However around 80% or 85% load has been concerned.

**Omanand** · 25-04-2012

TDP would allow you to compare power consumed by Navidia graphic card and the heat output generated by graphic card itself. Nvidia is trying to create their product which supposed to be terrible LGA1366 Core i7-980X Extreme Edition was having TDP of 140W and it is same as that of Athlon II X6 1090T Black Edition. However TDP of GTX 580 1.5GB seems to be 255W so they are supposed to twice hot then that of CPU which are available in the market. TDP can be considered as measuring of wastage of energy in simple terms you can say wastage of maximum input power.. I do agree with you that they are different manufacturer available in the market which are supposed to having different kind of method to measure rather then there should be a universal method so that we can get sensible judgment of TDP.

**veeru s** · 26-04-2012

It would give you an idea of power supply which can be used on your system. I have noticed that 6870 is using 24.5 watts and 470 using 202.3 watts while playing crysis. I have found that 580 seems to be using lots of power. Well I am saying that it is using less amount of power than that of 480. But when I played the game it was using 3watts as compared to 480. However you will be able to get better fps as compared to 480. Hence there would be better performance as compared 480. But it supposed to consume more power.