Saturday, June 6th 2020
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 Pictured?
Here are what could be the very first pictures of a reference NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 "Ampere" graphics card revealing an unusual board design, which is the biggest departure in NVIDIA's design schemes since the original GeForce TITAN. It features a dual-fan aluminium fin-stack cooler, except that one of its fans is located on the obverse side, and the other on the reverse side of the card. The PCB of the card appears to extend only two-thirds the length of the card, ending in an inward cutout, beyond which there's only an extension of the cooling solution. The cooler shroud, rather than being a solid covering of the heatsink, is made of aluminium heatsink ridges. All in all, a very unusual design, which NVIDIA could implement on its top-tier SKUs, such as the RTX 3080, RTX 3080 Ti, and in a cosmetic form on lower SKUs. We get the feeling that "Cyberpunk 2077" has influenced this design.
Sources:
ChipHell Forums, HXL (Twitter), VideoCardz
225 Comments on NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 Pictured?
Edit: some interesting analysis hinting that the card/leak could be very much real:
actually that is a brilliant design... especially if your PC case has good airflow lol big navi 2 is already officially coming in September. it makes sense Nvidia would want to respond in kind, even if its a limited launch, now that AMD has officially said Big Navi will arrive in September, Nvidia won't risk losing out on the cyberpunk 2077 market to them. Ampere will be here in Septemeber you better believe it homie.
These pics look like they were taken at NVIDIA's NVTTM (NVIDIA Time to Market) board OEM.
I really like the concept, maybe these graphics card are not hot as usual i hope so. Especially the fact that theres only one fan.
let me have all of its 250w headroom.just make the cooler better!
def looks like a 3d printer. the metal parts tricked me though.
The card design features a two-fan with a large heatsink likely to be hidden under a shroud, we can see the RTX 3080 backplate on one of the prototypes. The blue color of the upper sample is not the color of the card, this is just a wrap of the silver metallic shroud around the card. The design is very unique, both fans are placed on opposite sides of the card pushing the air in different directions.
The RTX 3080 design features an irregular shaped PCB, you can see this by looking at the rear of the card. This V-shaped design has allowed NVIDIA to place a fan pushing the air through the PCB, without extending the size of the card. This is a similar approach as to GeForce GTX 295 model, which also had a cut in the PCB near the fan.
We can’t see any power connectors in a typical place, which could mean that the connectors have been moved to the side, like on Quadro models. There also appears to be a new version of the NVLink connector near the I/O bracket.
videocardz.com/newz/nvidia-geforce-rtx-3080-pictured
For an xx80 SKU? Are you delirious? Below 150W? There is no way on earth that is happening, if for no other reason than that leaving too much upwards room for higher end cards. If it was that low power they could reach the same performance with a higher clocked lower size chip and thus increase their margins.
Two issues: this design doesn't seem to have room for any PCIe power plugs. They could possibly fit in the corners next to the fan, but that would be very tight. And the PCB is very small for a reference board, with the odd layout not being very cost effective. Fitting more than 8GB of GDDR6 on a board that small would be a challenge for sure, especially with the odd shape. There are two fans, one on the front and one on the back. Did you not read the post? Fans with some sort of ring connecting the blades aren't that uncommon. The faster Gentle Typhoons had that, for example, and some others too. It's especially useful for counteracting blades stretching and hitting the surrounding frame/heatsink without resorting to exotic materials.
I have no opinion on whether these are genuine or not though. Yeah, it's upside down.
This could be even a non-functional prototype, if not fake of course.
But anyway, it took Apple many years to realize their logo were upside down on their MacBooks :cool:
From everything I know when it comes to how things are done during manufacturing at board/card makers, this looks legit in terms of the blue plastic strips to keep things clean/scratch free, to the paper labels on which they write sample notes. I don't think this is fake as such.
I do think these are prototypes though and might just be mechanical samples, rather than fully working cards.
Could it be that nvidia is using HBM2 or is this due to another reason?
And you can still get aftermarket blower cooler :