Tuesday, June 9th 2020
NVIDIA's Next-Gen Reference Cooler Costs $150 By Itself, to Feature in Three SKUs
Pictures of alleged next-generation GeForce "Ampere" graphics cards emerged over the weekend, which many of our readers found hard to believe. It's features a dual-fan cooling solution, in which one of the two fans is on the reverse side of the card, blowing air outward from the cooling solution, while the PCB extends two-thirds the length of the card. Since then, there have been several fan-made 3D renders of the card. NVIDIA is not happy with the leak, and started an investigation into two of its contractors responsible for manufacturing Founders Edition (reference design) GeForce graphics cards, Foxconn and BYD (Build Your Dreams), according to a report by Igor's Lab.
According to the report, the cooling solution, which looks a lot more overengineered than the company's RTX 20-series Founders Edition cooler, costs a hefty USD $150, or roughly the price of a 280 mm AIO CLC. It wouldn't surprise us if Asetek's RadCard costs less. The cooler consists of several interconnected heatsink elements with the PCB in the middle. Igor's Lab reports that the card is estimated to be 21.9 cm in length. Given its cost, NVIDIA is reserving this cooler for only the top three SKUs in the lineup, the TITAN RTX successor, the RTX 2080 Ti successor, and the RTX 2080/SUPER successor.
All three will use the same cooling solution, and a common PCB design codenamed PG132. Further, all three cards will be based on a common ASIC, codenamed "GA102," with varying hardware specs. The "SKU10" (TITAN RTX successor) could ditch the TITAN brand to carry the model name "GeForce RTX 3090," max out the 384-bit wide memory bus of the GA102 ASIC, and feature a whopping 24 GB of GDDR6X memory, with 350 W typical board power.
The next SKU, the SK20, which is the RTX 2080 Ti successor, will be cut down from SKU10. It will feature 11 GB of GDDR6X memory across a 352-bit wide memory interface, and have a 320 W typical board power rating. This board will likely feature the RTX 3080 Ti branding. Lastly, there's the SKU30, which is further cut-down, features 10 GB of GDDR6X memory across a 320-bit wide memory interface, and it bears the RTX 3080 model number, succeeding the RTX 2080 / RTX 2080 Super.
When launched, "Ampere" could be the first implementation of the new GDDR6X memory standard, which could come with data-rates above even the 16 Gbps of today's GDDR6, likely in the 18-20 Gbps range, if not more. Lesser SKUs could use current-gen GDDR6 memory at data-rates of up to 16 Gbps.
Sources:
Igor's Lab, tor6770 (Reddit), VideoCardz, ChipHell Forums
According to the report, the cooling solution, which looks a lot more overengineered than the company's RTX 20-series Founders Edition cooler, costs a hefty USD $150, or roughly the price of a 280 mm AIO CLC. It wouldn't surprise us if Asetek's RadCard costs less. The cooler consists of several interconnected heatsink elements with the PCB in the middle. Igor's Lab reports that the card is estimated to be 21.9 cm in length. Given its cost, NVIDIA is reserving this cooler for only the top three SKUs in the lineup, the TITAN RTX successor, the RTX 2080 Ti successor, and the RTX 2080/SUPER successor.
The next SKU, the SK20, which is the RTX 2080 Ti successor, will be cut down from SKU10. It will feature 11 GB of GDDR6X memory across a 352-bit wide memory interface, and have a 320 W typical board power rating. This board will likely feature the RTX 3080 Ti branding. Lastly, there's the SKU30, which is further cut-down, features 10 GB of GDDR6X memory across a 320-bit wide memory interface, and it bears the RTX 3080 model number, succeeding the RTX 2080 / RTX 2080 Super.
When launched, "Ampere" could be the first implementation of the new GDDR6X memory standard, which could come with data-rates above even the 16 Gbps of today's GDDR6, likely in the 18-20 Gbps range, if not more. Lesser SKUs could use current-gen GDDR6 memory at data-rates of up to 16 Gbps.
92 Comments on NVIDIA's Next-Gen Reference Cooler Costs $150 By Itself, to Feature in Three SKUs
Selling a fancy cooler with separate cooling channel for vrm makes no sense on a standard board.
Its sure looks like it this time tho
Keep in mind though Pascal also brought a massive performance jump per tier. The price hike was justified. With Turing it was not, and it consequently didnt sell until Super.
Hopefully the fan can help scramble the egg, Fermi could not do this.
SLI is dead, CrossFire is dead, I wish people would accept this and move on. NVIDIA certainly aren't going to design their coolers around a dead technology.
Quite likely to be both more effective and cheaper to implement....
As mentioned by @Diverge , this current 3080 design is pretty much incompatible with many SFF cases, and if Nvidia isn't aiming for SFF compatibility, then why restrict themselves to a 2.0 slot cooler and standard height PCB?
Compared to the relatively simple coolers of the 2080 and its 180W TDP, estimates between 250 and 350W don't actually seem like unreasonable guesses.
top tier cards were,are and will be 250-280w even if they could achieve better efficiency at 225w.
imo they'll be 250-280w just like 2080Ti.unless there's sizeable performance to gain from +300w.
looks like they wanna sell expensive,overengineered stuff to enthusiasts
pascal was all about crazy clocks speeds,we went form 1350-1400mhz to +1900mhz on aib cards.My 1080 SJS ran at 1975mhz out of the box.
this is gonna have a lot of cuda and die area.therefore prolly more expensive.well,not this
www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/radeon-rx-vega-64-liquid-cooling.c2992