What do these things in a GPU mean?

Question

PCI-E 3.0 Ready: Delivers double the bandwidth per lane of PCIe GEN2 for faster GPU- CPU
Dual GPU card
Core clock speed
Core boost speed
Primitive Rate: 2 prim / clk
Shader Architecture: GCN
Stream Processors: 64 CU / 4096 ALU
Texture units: 256
ROPS / Z-Stencil: 64 / 256
Frame buffer/memory: 3GB GRRD5
Memory Width / Speed: 2x384 bit / 6000MHz
Load / Idle Board Power: <500W / <3W
Power Connectors: 2x 8-pin required
Display Outputs: DL-DVI-I, 4x Mini-Displayport

I know what some of it means but I am going to be building a system and need to know what all of it means.

Answer 1

PCI-Express 3 is the latest connection for graphics cards (GPU's), and is backwards compatible with PCI Express 2.

Dual GPU is essentially 2 cards in 1. in essence most of the specs are doubled

The clock speed is the speed of the processor on the GPU card, and boost is what ever it goes to at its max.

the next few items are just ways of rendering the video output.

Frame memory is how much ram is available to just the card. it is always included on the card.

Memory speed is the speed of the dedicated ram storage available to the card.

Board power is how much power the card consumes, you will need to get a power supply unit (PSU) with enough watts to power everything you put in, otherwise it will have a power shortage. You should give your self some more watts then the bare minimum the system needs to allow for upgrades later on.

Power connectors is how many power cables it requires to be functional. These cables come directly from the PSU I mentioned earlier.

Display ports are the video output ports. If your monitor uses VGA the card needs a VGA output, same with HDMI and DVI.



Sorry if this is confusing but I've explained it as best I can.

I noticed you got these specs from the MSI AMD R7990. You can get much better value cards than this, and additionally even the very latest GPU's wont play the latest games are max settings, they will on older games but not the newest of the new.

Answer 2

I'll start off down the list.

PCI-E 3.0 means the bus interface , PCI-E 3.0 is the latest in the PCI-E interfaces , meaning its the fastest. I don't believe it deliver's double the bandwidth compared to the previous generations , but it is more common. Remember , PCI-E 3.0 slots are backwards compatible with every PCI-E bus slot! Dual GPU means there is 2 GPU's on the PCB of the graphics card , so the HD 7990 from AMD Radeon is a dual gpu card because it features two HD 7970 GPUs. GPU stands for Graphics Processing Unit; so it's a bit like a GPU , but for graphics!



Core clock is what speed the GPU operates at , so much like a CPU , its for a GPU instead. Core boost speed is when the maker of the card lets you overclock it , again like a CPU , the faster it goes the better it performs!

Answer 3

Graphing Processing Unit (GPU)