6 ms·

I could be wrong - but I believe Nvidia bins the chips for Founders Edition cards

BoorishBears 6y ago
There's always a ton of speculation about it, I've seen the claim NVIDIA bins for FE cards and factory overclocked AIB cards together At the end of the day it doesn't really matter, you're paying a FE premium for early access mostly. On the plus side, this time the FE card might have a top tier cooling solution, which is why I'll probably be caving to their FE tax (and probably plenty of others, focusing on cooling was a smart move)
sincerely 6y ago
What does it mean to bin a chip?
- henriquez 6y ago
  they cherry-pick their best silicon so you can run them at higher speeds if you're overclocking or lower voltage if you want cooler temperatures and less power consumption at stock speeds.
- xxpor 6y ago
  Basically, after the chips are manufactured, they're not 100% uniform. Some have better performance, some have worse. In this case, it means they're reserving the best chips for the founders cards. In other cases, there have been instances where a company has two products, a high end and a low end (or medium, etc). In some of those cases, people have investigated and the chips are actually exactly the same, but the lower end product will have a core disabled or similar, depending on the exact product. That'll happen a lot of the time when the company has yield issues where too many of the chips don't have acceptable performance or one part of the chip is just broken. They'll disable the broken portion and boom, the lower end product is born. That's still a net win for them because the alternate is either to throw the entire thing away or spend more time improving the yield.
- dastbe 6y ago
  chip manufacturing is an imperfect process, and so there is variance in performance/viability of all of the hardware on a chip. the higher performing chips are "binned" for the top end of the price point, while the lower performing chips are either binned for lower performance or have some of their functionality disabled. For contrived example, A company may produce nothing but quad core chips but sell those with some cores that don't meet minimum performance as dual cores with the bad cores physically disabled.
Covzire 6y ago
I know for the 20 series Nvidia supplies AIB's like EVGA with binned chips too, higher end cards had GPU's with slightly different model numbers that typically clocked better. They probably do the same for all the different card makers.

There's always a ton of speculation about it, I've seen the claim NVIDIA bins for FE cards and factory overclocked AIB cards together At the end of the day it doesn't really matter, you're paying a FE premium for early access mostly. On the plus side, this time the FE card might have a top tier cooling solution, which is why I'll probably be caving to their FE tax (and probably plenty of others, focusing on cooling was a smart move)

sincerely 6y ago

What does it mean to bin a chip?

henriquez 6y ago
they cherry-pick their best silicon so you can run them at higher speeds if you're overclocking or lower voltage if you want cooler temperatures and less power consumption at stock speeds.
xxpor 6y ago
Basically, after the chips are manufactured, they're not 100% uniform. Some have better performance, some have worse. In this case, it means they're reserving the best chips for the founders cards. In other cases, there have been instances where a company has two products, a high end and a low end (or medium, etc). In some of those cases, people have investigated and the chips are actually exactly the same, but the lower end product will have a core disabled or similar, depending on the exact product. That'll happen a lot of the time when the company has yield issues where too many of the chips don't have acceptable performance or one part of the chip is just broken. They'll disable the broken portion and boom, the lower end product is born. That's still a net win for them because the alternate is either to throw the entire thing away or spend more time improving the yield.
dastbe 6y ago
chip manufacturing is an imperfect process, and so there is variance in performance/viability of all of the hardware on a chip. the higher performing chips are "binned" for the top end of the price point, while the lower performing chips are either binned for lower performance or have some of their functionality disabled. For contrived example, A company may produce nothing but quad core chips but sell those with some cores that don't meet minimum performance as dual cores with the bad cores physically disabled.

Covzire 6y ago

I know for the 20 series Nvidia supplies AIB's like EVGA with binned chips too, higher end cards had GPU's with slightly different model numbers that typically clocked better. They probably do the same for all the different card makers.