"Noozer" said:
Just watching the hardware monitor in RivaTuner and while running NFS MW the
Voltage Regulator Current jumped up to over 45amps!!!
Is this card REALLY drawing 45amps?
Depends on where the measurement is being done.
For example, I was working out someone's processor current tonight.
I took an Intel processor rated at 103W.
Measuring the current as it comes from the power supply, it would be:
(103W/12V)*(1/0.90) = 9.5A from the 12V supply (90% efficient Vcore).
That is the current measured feeding into the Vcore circuit.
On the output side of Vcore, the processor VID might be 1.3 volts.
We know the power is 103W.
103W/1.3V = 79 amps flows into the processor pins.
That is the current flowing from the MOSFET area of
the motherboard, into the processor.
The power is a constant. If the voltage at a point in the circuit
is low, then the amperage must be high. If the voltage is high,
then the amperage must be low. Thus, in my Vcore example above,
we have 12V @ 9.5A in one part of the circuit, and 1.3 @ 79A
in another part of the circuit.
On a video card, the GPU can be fed from +12V. There is a switching
regulator on the video card, just like the motherboard. The GPU
core uses a low voltage. It is quite possible for the current
feeding the GPU, to have a high value. Some GPUs are running
around 60W+, but I don't know what voltage value they use for
their cores.
The 45 amp value, suggests a current is being measured in a
low voltage area of circuitry.
So, I don't know what part of the circuit your software tool
is looking at, but a numerical value of 45 amps is not impossible.
Consider a 130W processor running at 1.3V - that would be around
100 amps.
HTH,
Paul
