Hot on the heels of this weekend’s leaked images of NVIDIA’s upcoming RTX 3080 design, new details about the GPU giant’s consumer RTX Ampere plans have come to light.
According to outlet Igor’sLAB, NVIDIA is planning to push out three different variants of the RTX 3000-series based around the PG132 board. The differentiating factors are allegedly the memory count and power.
This shared design would align with the oppressively chunky dual-sided cooler and irregular PCB seen in the leaks as NVIDIA will want to fashion a solution that works on as many cards as possible to ease production costs.
Igor’sLAB also reports that manufacturing the cooler alone costs a steep $150 implying that these top of the line Founder’s Edition GPUs will sell at a serious premium.
The first of the three variants is the RTX 3090, known as SKU10, possibly the next-gen equivalent of the TITAN. It features 24 GB of GDDR6 memory, 384-bit interface, 350 W TBP, three DisplayPort, one HDMI, and NVLINK.
Moving on, we have the RTX 3080 Ti/Super, known as SKU20, with 11 GB of GDDR6, 352-bit interface, 320 W TBP, three DisplayPort, and one HDMI.
Finally, the latest information points to an RTX 3080 variant, known as SKU30, featuring 10 GB of GDDR6, 320-bit interface, 320 W TBP, three DisplayPort, and one HDMI.
The last two models with 11 GB and 10 GB of GDDR6 memory do raise some questions. It’s unlikely NVIDIA would push out high-end models with no more than a 1 GB memory difference. The RTX 3080 Ti seems the odd one out here, with too few improvements on the base RTX 3080 to warrant its own place in the higher-end RTX 3000-series hierarchy. We’ll have to wait for an official announcement from NVIDIA to clarify precisely what the plan is here.
The new report also suggests that NVIDIA is not taking the recent leak likely and has launched investigations into two manufacturers – Foxconn and Build Your Dreams. Additionally, Igor’sLAB suggests last weekend’s leak was as fresh as they get – even NVIDIA’s own sales and product managers have allegedly yet to see the final design.
As always, take the original leak and this latest report with a pinch of salt. With so much activity around the next-gen consumer RTX cards, it’s only a matter of time before we hear something official from NVIDIA.