Graphics Cards - Page 159

We are just days away from NVIDIA releasing the GeForce RTX 3060, where at the time of writing I'm knee-deep in benchmarking graphics cards at 7 o'clock in the morning -- but US retailers are listing the GeForce RTX 3060 early and it ain't pretty.

Now we have some leaked photos from US retailers courtesy of Coreteks, where the $329 MSRP that NVIDIA has stamped onto its GeForce RTX 3060 not even making it to launch. NVIDIA will not be making a GeForce RTX 3060 Founders Edition graphics card so it is all left to the AIB partners, and boy is it going to get messy.

$329 MSRP but a shelf price brand new of $485 for the MSI GeForce RTX 3060 Ventus X2 graphics card, while the flagship MSI GeForce RTX 3060 GAMING X TRIO costs $515 -- $180+ over the MSRP that NVIDIA itself has set for the GeForce RTX 3060.

The GALAX GeForce RTX 3090 HOF family of graphics cards is now up for pre-order worldwide, depending on the market that is, with the GALAX Malaysia pre-order page stating 1 card will be distributed to each of the 11 participating stores in that particular country.

Just quickly, the HOF display does look pretty awesome -- if not a bit wanky, but still awesome.

But what price are you looking for? Well, the cheapest model out of all of the new GALAX GeForce RTX 3090 HOF cards is the regular RTX 3090 HOF which will cost at least $2600 -- while the higher-end GALAX GeForce RTX 3090 HOF Limited Edition will cost $3100 or so.

It seems as though AMD could be offering not just a single SKU of the Radeon RX 6700 XT graphics card, but two of them -- each with different TGPs.

The news is coming from Coreteks' sources, who says the variants are referred to as ASIC A and ASIC B, with ASIC A offering up to 230W while ASIC B will offer up to 189W. This would most likely be the difference between stock/reference Radeon RX 6700 XT graphics cards, and tweaked custom Radeon RX 6700 XT graphics cards from AIB partners.

We are to expect a decent 20-25% or higher uplift in performance over the previous-gen RDNA-based Radeon RX 5700 XT graphics card. The new AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT has 12GB of GDDR6 memory at a faster 16Gbps, which I'm sure is going to prime for crypto miners.

We're seeing fully custom Radeon RX 6900 XT graphics cards hit the market now -- well, released maybe not hit the market -- with my recent review on SAPPHIRE's new custom TOXIC Radeon RX 6900 XT Limited Edition blowing me away. Up next we have PowerColor and its new Radeon RX 6900 XT Liquid Devil teased... check it out:

PowerColor will be launching its fully custom water-cooled Liquid Devil branded graphics cards in both Radeon RX 6900 XT and Radeon RX 6800 XT form. VideoCardz reports that the company is using a custom EKWB Quantum Vector RX 6800/6900 water block with a custom backplate.

We should expect the company to launch its new Radeon RX 6900 XT Liquid Devil, and the Radeon RX 6800 XT Liquid Devil sometime next week. We will have full pictures by then, and a better look at the wider PCB that PowerColor seems to be using here on its new custom Big Navi graphics cards.

AMD is reportedly gearing up for its new Instinct MI200 compute accelerator -- note the lack of the Radeon brand here -- with its new CDNA-based accelerator reportedly rocking an MCM (multi-chip module) design according to the latest leaks.

The new CDNA-based AMD Instinct MI200 will be making its first appearance inside of the US Department of Energy's upcoming Frontier supercomputer, which will also rock AMD Trento EPYC processors. The new AMD Instinct MI200 accelerators will reportedly feature MCM (multi-chip module) design that would see a doubling in cores over the Arcturus-based MI100 accelerator.

AMD's new Instinct MI200 accelerator will reportedly be using the OAM form factor (open-source accelerator infrastructure) while it would also be available for the HPE Cray EX supercomputer, too.

We know the GeForce RTX 3060 is coming, and it's officially coming on February 25 -- but that hasn't stopped it from hitting the headlines over crypto mining, and now it's on sale for $1080 on second hand markets overseas... yeah.

Belarusian second-hand market Onliner already has listings for the GIGABYTE GeForce RTX 3060 EAGLE graphics card, offering the Ampere GPU mixed with 12GB of GDDR6 memory for $329... selling for $1080 second hand. Yes, $1080 for the single GeForce RTX 3060 -- that is not for all 3, but for a single RTX 3060.

We've reached peak GPU pricing insanity here folks.

We've heard that AMD would be launching its mid-range killer Radeon RX 6700 XT graphics card in March 2021, but now Cowcotland has reportedly confirmed the release of the Radeon RX 6700 XT for March 18.

The card was teased back in November 2020 but confirmed by AMD in January 2021 for a release in March 2021 -- it seems March 18 could be the day. The same day the Zack Snyder's Justice League debuts on HBO Max, what a day. The new Radeon RX 6700 XT will be the first use of the Navi 22 GPU, and it'll pack 12GB of GDDR6 memory.

AMD's upcoming Navi 22 GPU will feature 40 Compute Units, so 2560 Stream Processors -- leaving room for a lower-end Radeon RX 6700 graphics card in non-XT form.

NVIDIA will be releasing its new GeForce RTX 3060 graphics card next week, and with it there will be a significant new driver release that destroys crypto mining performance by up to 50% on some algorithms.

The upcoming release of the GeForce RTX 3060 would've been very popular for crypto miners, as it would offer a card that is the most power efficient Ampere offering yet -- and it won't cost as much as the higher-end GeForce RTX 3070 and RTX 3080 graphics cards.

But it seems NVIDIA will be discouraging crypto miners in a big way with new GeForce drivers coming that will automatically detect mining-specific algorithms, and then limit the hash rate performance by 50%. NVIDIA seems to make this specific about the GeForce RTX 3060, but I wonder how long it'll be until all GeForce graphics cards are gimped from mining.

NVIDIA's new GeForce RTX 3080 can get pretty hot, but how just how hot does the card get if it is passively cooled... with no fans at all? Not that hot, actually.

The folks at Turemetal which is a brand that specializes in fanless PC systems, posted some photos of their Turemetal UP10 case with a passively-cooled NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 graphics card. This isn't the first totally fanless GeForce RTX 3080 but it is the first that has an entire PC passively cooled and running super stress tests like Furmark.

Inside of the Turemetal UP10 case is an AMD Ryzen 5 5600X processor with a 65W TDP, and ASUS TUF Gaming GeForce RTX 3080 graphics card. The entire system is using around 410W of power, with the CPU and GPU both using custom heat spreaders that are then connected to a huge heat sink with what feels like 100+ heat pipes.

We all know how impossible it is to buy a graphics card these days, fighting between a lack of supply, scalpers, the COVID pandemic, supply chain issues, and especially cryptocurrency miners.

Well, NVIDIA has just announced its new Crypto Mining Processor HX series, new cards that are made specifically for crypto mining and more specifically Ethereum mining. There are 4 new CMP HX cards announced: the 30HX, 40HX, 50HX, and 90HX with varying levels of mining performance, power consumption, power connectors, memory sizes, and availability.

Starting with the new NVIDIA CMP 30HX with its 26MH/s Ethereum mining power at 125W, this will require just a single 8-pin PCI power cable and have 6GB of VRAM. The higher-end 40HX ups the Ethereum hash rate to 36MH/s at 185W, uses the same single 8-pin PCIe power cable but ups the VRAM to 8GB. Both of these CMP mining cards will be available in Q1 2021.

Samsung has just announced its new adventure into HBM technology, with the introduction of HBM-PIM with the 'PIM' standing for processing-in-memory. But what the hell does that mean?

The new HBM-PIM technology allows for some programmability inside of the memory layer, thanks to an embedded "DRAM-optimized" AI engine inside of the memory banks. This new AI engine is called a PCU or Programmable Compute Unit, which will handle the data between your CPU and memory in a parallelized way.

This is because most computing systems of today are based on the von Neumann architecture, which separates processor and memory units to do millions of individual processing tasks. This can be congested as you can imagine, so HBM-PIM provides processing power directly stored on a DRAM-optimized AI engine inside of each memory bank.

ZOTAC stepped in a huge puddle of sh*t a few hours ago, happily posting and endorsing the huge of its GPUs with huge crypto mining farms and then tagging it with #PcGaming... yeah. It was removed, but the internet being the internet means it's forever:

In the picture you can see that ZOTAC is showing off a crypto mining rig that is powered by a bunch of their own GeForce RTX 3070 Twin Edge graphics cards and then ZOTAC used a bunch of hashtags that are for PC gamers. These hashtags include #PcGaming, #Gaming, #Gamers, #Tech, #PcHardware, #PcComponents, #PCMR, #PcMasterRace, and #RTX.

It seems ZOTAC has no issues with miners... and maybe that's why I can't get anymore samples out of them. I've tried, but they told me they don't have the stock... meanwhile other AIBs are sending more review samples than ever before. Maybe ZOTAC is happy to keep them all, because they're racking up those mining $$$.

If you thought graphics card availability was bad now we could be in for many more months of the same, if not worse -- with supply of GeForce RTX 30 series graphics cards remaining tight until at least July 2021 according to the latest reports.

ExtremeTech reports from information at Alternate.NL which is a retailer that sells to Germany, Netherlands, and Belgium. The site reports:

Not only are the GeForce RTX 30 series graphics cards impossible to find, but crypto miners are buying them up in gigantic batches, scalpers are getting in and making huge profits, and on top of that the prices are skyrocketing. It's a gigantic perfect storm that ultimately hurts gamers.

Intel is currently playing around with it's next-gen Xe HPG gaming GPU in the labs, with GPU boss Raja Koduri tweeting out a picture of the Xe GPU mesh shading in action.

Raja teased an unreleased 3DMark Mesh Shader Feature test, something that was up and running on the Intel Xe HPG gaming graphics card. This is the first public test of the Intel Xe HPG graphics card, and while it's just a 3DMark Mesh Shading Feature test, at least it's something.

It would've been nice for Raja to tweet out the Intel Xe HPG gaming-focused graphics card playing Crysis, or at least Cyberpunk 2077 -- but a Mesh Shading Feature test will have to do for now.

GALAX is getting closer and closer to the official launch of its new GeForce RTX 3090 Hall of Fame (HOF) graphics cards, with 3 of the new cards listed on Australian retailer Mwave for up to $4500 AUD.

The new GALAX GeForce RTX 3090 HOF, GeForce RTX 3090 HOF Premium and GeForce RTX 3090 HOF Limited Edition are all listed for $3899 AUD, $3999 AUD, and $4499 AUD respectively. Australia has a 10% GST which is added to their products (fact check: I'm an Aussie) so these prices would convert, very roughly, to:

It seems Mwave is very ahead of the curve, and seems to be the first retailer in the world to list GALAX's new GeForce RTX 3090 HOF family of graphics cards.

This isn't good for Pakistan, its distributors and retailers -- or the general public, as NVIDIA's unreleased GeForce RTX 3060 graphics cards are being sold in the country already.

ZAH Computers is an official dealer in Pakistan, selling the Palit GeForce RTX 3060 Dual OC graphics card for 120,000 PKR (Pakistani Rupees) which works out to around $750 or so... a huge premium, price gouging at its finest over the starting price of the GeForce RTX 3060 which is meant to be $329.

But don't worry, the company is saying that the $750 premium pricing is because of the high customs duties and import prices. Our friends at Wccftech report that "simply put are excuses that these distributors and dealers are known to hide behind and have been doing so for quite a while now".

NVIDIA's new mainstream GeForce RTX 3060 graphics card wasn't a secret, with the company revealing the card during CES 2021 -- but now we have a firm release date: February 25, 2021.

Our friends at Wccftech report that the GeForce RTX 3060 will go live on February 25 @ 6AM PST, with global retail outlets kicking off sales starting at $329. We should expect various custom GeForce RTX 3060 graphics cards to be released, with varying prices -- which will also come down to how many of them are available given the massive GPU shortages worldwide.

NVIDIA's new GeForce RTX 3060 rocks the Ampere GA106-300 GPU on Samsung's 8nm node, 3584 CUDA cores, 12GB of GDDR6 @ 15Gbps on a 192-bit memory bus with up to 384GB/sec of memory bandwidth. We have a 170W TDP on the card (down from the 175W on the RTX 3060 Ti) and price that starts at $329.

PNY has just unveiled its new custom, and super-small GeForce RTX 3060 graphics card which I'm sure has one of the longest names for a graphics card that I've ever seen.

This is the PNY GeForce RTX 3060 12GB XLR8 Gaming REVEL EPIC-X RGB Single Fan Edition graphics card -- yeah, the PNY GeForce RTX 3060 12GB XLR8 Gaming REVEL EPIC-X RGB Single Fan Edition. What a mouthful of a name, huh?!

We have a Mini-ITX card here, the first Mini-ITX GeForce RTX 3060 from PNY but the third RTX 3060 the company has released so far. PNY has a base GPU clock of 1627MHz and a boost GPU clock of 1852MHz -- there's also 12GB of GDDR6 memory here on a 192-bit memory interface that provides up to 336GB/sec of memory bandwidth.

EMTEK has just revealed a very interesting graphics card, with the South Korean AIB unveiling its new GeForce RTX 3090 Blower Edition graphics card, check it out:

The card has an old-school blower-style cooler with all that grunt underneath the GeForce RTX 3090 still there with its huge 24GB GDDR6X framebuffer. The card has a semi-custom design, with EMTEK using the NVIDIA reference RTX 3090 board with dual 8-pin PCIe power connectors.

Where EMTEK has done things differently with its GeForce RTX 3090 Blower Edition graphics card is that it used a daughterboard to have the dual 8-pin PCIe power connectors. The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 Founders Edition uses the single 12-pin PCIe power connector, but EMTEK went with the daughterboard at the end of the card.

I think these plans are changing far too much, but another day -- another rumor for the purported, indefinitely postponed GeForce RTX 3080 Ti graphics card. New rumors suggest it's coming in April 2021 with 12GB of GDDR6X memory.

Leaker kopite7kimi posted on Twitter saying back in December 2020 that the GeForce RTX 3080 Ti specs he'd been hearing from his sources said the card would rock 10496 CUDA cores and 20GB of GDDR6X memory. But he has said that "things have changed" and the new "current spec" if 10240 CUDA cores and 12GB of GDDR6X memory.

The changes there see 256 CUDA cores cut down from the previously rumored GeForce RTX 3080 Ti specifications, and a big drop from the 20GB of GDDR6X on the previous specs from late 2020, to just 12GB of GDDR6X with the new specs. This is 2GB more than the RTX 3080 (10GB GDDR6X) and 12GB less than the RTX 3090 (24GB GDDR6X).