AFAIK:

980M - 100W / 1060 ~ 80W / 1070 ~ 120W / 1080 ~ 150W

If they started out with the max TDP of 100W for the cooling system - upgrading it to 150W in that small space it sounds like too much of a change to meet their DL?

Clearly this does not excuse the reengineering but it might explain why they went this route.

I can't imagine that it was power envelope. Pascal really made progress on power efficiency, which is what makes it even more surprising.

You're surprised that they didn't use a top of the line card when most of their target audience will never even make the thing sweat? I have a 1080 and use it to play games at 4k while driving two additional 1080p monitors. It kicks ass and I push it much harder than most digital artists ever will.

Well there are two reasons I was surprised they didn't use the 1080, one was that it is surprisingly hard on a GPU to do the sort of lag free drawing/manipulation. When I'm turning a 3D part around in "quality" render mode in TurboCAD and modifying it on the fly it works out the GPU fairly well. Unlike games its pretty much forced to recompute lighting fairly often.

The other was that they have already crossed over the "luxury" threshold from "just another PC" to "special hotness" sort of territory. So unless Nvidia is giving them a smoking deal on "old" GPU's it seems that from a marketing perspective you would want to check off all the boxes. Its reported that it would use less power and generate less heat, and Nvidia says it is 20% faster. That seems like it would be a "no brainer". But I clearly don't know.

That is why it surprised me when I read the high end Studio only had the GTX980 in it.

> when most of their target audience will never even make the thing sweat

Really? First thing I thought when I saw it was how cool it would be for 3D sculpting. There are more uses for high end GPUs than gaming.

Of course there are people who will, but there are more who won't and thing that e.g. Photoshop requires a 1070 or better.

I think the idea that it's a digital drafting table that can also be used as a desktop computer is the right way to think of it (as many have alluded to in this thread).

I wonder why ms didn't stick with AMD (like the xbox one) if they weren't going to use a 1080 (or 1070, might make more sense).

As someone that used to enjoy drawing/doodling but never made the leap from mouse to a digital pen - sketching and doodling on the surface 4 was eye-opening. Any number of programs paired with the pen/screen feels a lot like ink drawing without the mess and with multi-level undo.

The combination of a decent pen and great screen makes for a very satisfying and immediate drawing experience.