User finds Nvidia GeForce RTX 3090 with repurposed 'ES GPU'

A reader and forum member of the German language tech site HardwareLuxx recently decided to upgrade his Nvidia GeForce RTX 3090 Founders Edition to liquid cooling. The PC DIYer, who goes by the name of iso0, had to take off the Nvidia reference design shroud and clean the old thermal paste off the GPU before reapplying fresh paste, to fit the water cooling block. However, what lay beneath the sticky silver grey paste was quite a surprise.

As you can see in the photo of iso0's GPU, above and below, this Nvidia GPU has had its ID changed. What once was designated as a GA102-250-KD-A1, has somehow been re-categorised as a GA102-300-A1… From leaks and rumours about the unannounced GeForce RTX 3080 Ti in previous months, it is thought that the GA102-250-KD-A1 was the GPU that was going to feature in that mythical beast. However, it is a step below the RTX 3090, and GPUs aren't usually repurposed as higher-end GPUs, it usually goes the other way – so what is happening?

HardwareLuxx Editor Andreas Schilling thinks that the most likely scenario is something like this; the GA102-250-KD-A1 was an Engineering Sample (ES) chip which was made to test out various RTX 3080 Ti memory configurations. Meanwhile, Nvidia has been adjusting what the RTX 3080 Ti would deliver, in the face of rival market offerings, namely the high-end AMD RDNA 2 graphics cards. Having seen the generous memory quotas of the AMD efforts, and then worked out that they aren't available to buy, just like its own efforts, Nvidia seems to have gone through three iterations of the RTX 308 0Ti, as tabulated below.

Above you can see that the latest RTX 3080 Ti rumours point to Nvidia cutting the SMs to 80, which would open up the possibility of using silicon which didn't have a full quota of 82 SMs working perfectly. It seems to have again settled on 12GB being enough to compete without cannibalising its RTX 3090 sales.

Thus, the GeForce RTX 3080 Ti rumours may have shifted over recent weeks / months due to the hardware actually changing. Another thing that seems to change a lot about this GPU is the expected release date. The latest information points to an April / May launch window. Around the same time we expect to see an RTX 3070 Ti offered in both 8GB and 16GB configurations.