Exclusive: AMD surprised the world with the announcement of the Radeon VII during CES 2019 last week, with it being the surprise announcement before its bigger unveiling of Navi towards June/July this year.

The new Radeon VII otherwise known as Radeon 7 is a revamped Vega graphics card, where at the end of the day it's just a Radeon Instinct MI50 accelerator that was released in November last year. We have the same Vega 20 GPU on the fresh new 7nm node, the same 16GB of HBM2 memory, and similar GPU clocks to the new Radeon VII graphics card.

Since the announcement I reached out to some industry contacts who said there will be "less than 5000" made. The same source said AMD is losing money on each card sold as they are, as I said before, just Radeon Instinct MI50 cards that are being re-purposed into 'new' Radeon VII cards.

CES 2019 - AMD is promising many more Radeon graphics cards to be released in the year, with CTO Mark Papermaster chatting with The Street about an entire new wave of Radeon cards coming in the year.

Papermaster confirmed AMD isn't shifting away from the mid-range market since its debut of the higher-end Radeon VII unveiled during CES 2019, with Papermaster saying: "We are really excited to start on the high-end with our 7nm Radeon VII and you will see the announcements over the course of the year as we refresh across our Radeon program".

I would expect to see Navi unveiled just before or during Computex 2019 and priced lower than Radeon VII (which costs $699). There is a huge gap between the newly-refreshed-refreshed-again Radeon RX 590 which is based on the 12nm node and third-time-refreshed Polaris 10 architecture. Radeon RX 590 costs $279 and there's nothing between that and the upcoming Radeon VII apart from Radeon RX Vega 56/64. Older cards that consume way too much power, and leave gamers buying GeForce RTX 2060 and GTX 1070/1070 Ti/1080 because they're far more power efficient.

CES 2019 - NVIDIA had its own big CES 2019 press conference a few days ago where it made the GeForce RTX 2060 graphcis card official, while it was AMD's turn yesterday with their CES 2019 presser and the unveiling of the new Radeon VII graphics card.

Radeon VII will be arriving as the world's first 7nm graphics card for gamers, with a huge 16GB of HBM2 memory with 1TB/sec of memory bandwidth for $699. It launches on February 7, and all within 24 hours we've had NVIDIA's founder and CEO Jensen Huang talk about AMD's return to the enthusiast end of PC graphics cards as "underwhelming".

Gordon Ung from PCWorld spoke to the NVIDIA CEO, where he asked Huang about his thoughts on the just-announced Radeon VII graphics card, with Huang saying "it's underwhelming. The performance is lousy and there's nothing new". He added there's "no ray tracing, no AI. It's 7nm with HBM memory that barely keeps up with a 2080. And if we turn on DLSS we'll crush it. And if we turn on ray tracing we'll crush it".

Huang goes for the throat with Radeon VII trash talk (and I love it, the competition is heating up) where he added: "It's a weird launch, maybe they thought of it this morning". Huang is clearly playing around in some part, but it gets better: PCWorld asked AMD CEO Lisa Su thought about Huang's remarks about the upcoming Radeon VII where Su quipped: "What I would say is that we're very excited about Radeon VII, and I would probably suggest that he hasn't seen it yet".

CES 2019 - AMD has just announced its new Radeon VII graphics card at CES 2019, dropping the Vega brand it seems and going for VII. The new Radeon VII graphics card rocks a 7nm Vega GPU and 16GB of HBM2 memory with a huge 1TB/sec of memory bandwidth. This is the world's first 7nm graphics card to hit the market, beating NVIDIA with a major technical win - it's also the first gaming graphics card with HBM2 capable of 1TB/sec, absolutely insane.

AMD's new Radeon VII graphics card has 3840 stream processors, less than the 4096 stream processors on the Vega 10 GPU inside of the Radeon RX Vega 64. However, the new Radeon VII has 16GB of HBM2 which has a much larger 1TB/sec memory bandwidth, double the HBM2 bandwidth available on the Radeon RX Vega 64 graphics card.

The new Radeon VII has 25% more performance at the same levels as the RX Vega 64, with dual 8-pin PCIe power connectors and a much-improved triple-fan cooler that should keep the GPU clocks up at close to 1.8GHz. The average boost CPU clock on the original Radeon RX Vega 64 was 1546MHz so the boost to 1800MHz on Radeon VII is pretty significant. The new HBM2 memory is on a larger 4096-bit memory bus and faster 2Gbps HBM2 (compared to 1.89Gbps on the HBM2 on Vega 10) - oh, and double the amount at 16GB that provides the huge 1TB/sec.

NVIDIA already has four members in its GeForce RTX family of graphics cards with the just-launched RTX 2060, and previously launched RTX 2070, RTX 2080, and RTX 2080 Ti graphics cards. But what if you took the ray tracing cores out of the situation? Well, that could be what the purported GeForce GTX 11 series is after all.

A new GeForce GTX 1180 graphics card has surfaced on GFXBench, with software recognizing the card as a GeForce GTX 2080 which means if this is real, it is an RTX 2080 with its ray tracing cores disabled. They're still there on-hardware with the Turing GPU, but they're disabled so that it's a nutured and RTX-less RTX 2080 in performance. It makes sense considering the GDDR6 performance gains over GDDR5/X as well, with a GTX 11 series something that makes sense when the GTX 10 series is finally phased out.

I think we'll see RTX 20 series cards mass produced with lower-quality dies having their Tensor and RT cores disabled and rebranded as GTX 11 series cards, something that will surely compete against the Radeon RX 590 from AMD as well as whatever the new Navi GPU ends up as being. Last we heard Navi will feature Vega-like performance, which means we should expect GTX 1080/1180 performance (RTX 2080 with RT disabled). Interesting if true...

CES 2019 - EVGA took one of its new Z390 Dark motherboards to the Consumer Electronics Show and had it in their suite showing it off in all of its enthusiast glory. We're talking E-ATX form favor, crazy 17-phase VRM on a 10-layer PCB, and so much more.

This is the everything-including-the-kitchen sink motherboard from EVGA in its Z390 Dark board, which as we said before comes with 17-phase VRM on a 10-layer PCB, but an EVGA-embedded wireless solution, 3 x PCIe 3.0 x16 slots, and more. We have the 24-pin ATX and 2 x 8-pin power connectors with right-angle connectors so there is not a huge amount of cables coming vertically off of the motherboard. This is especially helpful for people changing out hardware like CPUs, RAM, and GPUs all the tiem as it means the huge 24-pin ATX power cable is not in the way, and neither are the 8-pin power connectors going into the motherboard.

EVGA's new Z390 Dark motherboard has 4 x DIMMs that support up to 32GB of DDR4-4600+, dual 1GbE network ports, Creative Sound Core3D audio, 2-way SLI support, M.2 SSD ports, SATA6 ports, and plenty of USB connectivity to boot.

CES 2019 - ZOTAC has officially announced its new GeForce RTX 2080 Ti ArcticStorm graphics card, a new Turing-based RTX 2080 Ti that is watercooled and ready to be overclocked to its limits.

The new ZOTAC GeForce RTX 2080 Ti ArcticStorm rolls out with an updated ArcticStorm liquid cooling package that features a tweaked design with precision guided laser etching that directs lighting so that it shines more sharply, and is customizable through the SPECTRA 2.0 lighting system.

ZOTAC is using a 16+4 power delivery system which should ensure some pretty high GPU and GDDR6 overclocks, but that remains to be seen. We should expect it to look out of this world when operating, something I'd love to build a new 4K 144FPS gaming PC with. Mmm.

CES 2019 - MSI's new GeForce RTX 2080 Ti Lightning graphics card has been spotted in the wild at CES 2019 by our friends at Hardware Canucks, where we now know the RTX 2080 Ti Lightning will feature a slick new style.

With the upcoming GeForce RTX 2080 Ti Lightning graphics card MSI is using a large 3-fan cooler shroud that is covered in a gorgeous gold and black theme with carbon fiber. The overall design is close to the previous-gen MSI GeForce GTX 1080 Ti Lightning, but the new carbon fiber look and change to gold and black is very welcomed. I love the look of the card, it'll really pop in a gaming PC with the right components to match it with some RGB lights sparkling off of it. Mmm.

We should expect some great out-of-the-box results with factory overclocking by MSI on the GeForce RTX 2080 Ti Lightning and I'm sure there's more headroom than usual on an overclocked RTX 2080 Ti. It's a card built for overclocking so we should see it tweaked a heap and then the cooler ripped off for some LN2 cooling, but those pesky limitations by NVIDIA will always hold cards like this off without massive modifications done. Still, in stock form this is going to be a BEAST.

CES 2019 - ASUS has just unveiled its new flagship ROG MATRIX GeForce RTX 2080 Ti graphics card with one of the most unique cooling systems on the market, with ASUS using something it calls an Infinity Loop which has been done before, but not like this.

The new ASUS ROG MATRIX GeForce RTX 2080 Ti is said to keep the Turing GPU and its GDDR6 memory as cool as a huge 240mm radiator would, so this is big, really big for ASUS to claim. ASUS has had to make a beefy card to get this much cooling tech into a 3-slot design, with the shroud using 3 x axial blade fans that were introduced with the first wave of GeForce RTX 20 series STRIX graphcis cards.

The front of the card has laser-etched design accents that look super awesome with LEDs running through them, and a black and silver style on the front. The RGB lighting can be controlled with ASUS' own Aura Sync RGB software.

Out of the box we're looking at the new ASUS ROG MATRIX GeForce RTX 2080 Ti rocking boost GPU clocks of 1815MHz, which increases the normal 14.2 TFLOPs of compute performance to 15.7 TFLOPs, but no gaming numbers were provided just yet. We can expect that manual overclocking will be pretty damn good on this card, but whether we'll see records broken with it in stock form and not ripped apart and put under LN2 is another question.

There's not much to say about the latest on EVGA's new tease on the GeForce RTX 2080 Ti Kingpin graphics card, with a brief tease in December it has been silence ever since.

The latest is a picture that shows off the gorgeous cooler that EVGA has used on the card, with the company using a combo AIO closed loop liquid cooler, as well as a traditional heat sink and single fan. The liquid closed-loop-cooler (CLC) will be doing most of the work where it will have a pump block over the GPU and take some of the heat and offload it to secondary heat sinks.

EVGA is taking care of the GDDR6 and VRMs on the GeForce RTX 2080 Ti Kingpin which will be cooled by a 100mm fan, while copper is used throughout the card especially on its secondary heat sinks. All in all, it looks great so far, and I really want to see what they can do when they're pushed to the limit.