Nvidia Turing graphics card leak suggests September release and high prices

Following an earlier report regarding the pricing and release timing of the upcoming 2018 editions of Nvidia’s GeForce GTX graphics cards, WccfTech claims to have learned even more information from sources connected to one of Nvidia’s manufacturing partners – some of which is contradictory.

In short, according to WccfTech’s sources, expect these cards to be expensive and arrive in September – not over a course of months as per the previous report – but there’s so much more than that to dig through. 

While the outlet is supposedly privy to specifications for three new graphics cards, namely their power draw (measured in watts) and video memory capacity, apparently not even Nvidia’s manufacturing partners know what this generation’s naming convention will be, whether that’s 11xx, 20xx or something else entirely.

Here’s a bulleted breakdown of the three Nvidia graphics cards coming soon which are expected to run on Nvidia’s new Turing graphics architecture, including power draw, vRAM amounts, US manufacturer's suggested retail price (MSRP) and release timing. 

Since the model numbers are unknown, let the wattage be your guide as to where each fits within the hierarchy – the 120W card will likely fill the role of today’s GTX 1060, the 150W in the role of the GTX 1070 and so on.

• 180W GPU (11GB vRAM): $699 – $749 in first week of September
• 150W GPU (8GB vRAM): $599 by the second week of September
• 120W GPU (8GB vRAM): $499 by end of September

Now, what you’ll immediately notice is that, according to WccfTech’s sources, Nvidia plans to charge nearly twice as much for the next-generation 120W graphics card than it currently does for the GTX 1060 Founders Edition at $299 (about £225, AU$400). This is likely for two reasons: first off, this version ups the video memory by 2GB, which should improve performance considerably.

Secondly, WccfTech suspects that Nvidia is not going to stop selling the 10 series graphics cards, but rather sell them at a discount in the face of these new cards to build a larger family of products to hit more price points. Let’s hope this checks out, and that the upcoming 120W card is substantially more powerful than today’s.

Remember, these pricing details are all according to MSRP in the US. Nvidia’s partners can price their versions of Nvidia’s GPU hardware however they wish, but don’t expect prices much lower than what’s seen here, as they too have to make a living. In fact, WccfTech's sources claims Nvidia won't have enough stock to meet initial demand, and to expect demand-related price tomfoolery to take place on retailers like Amazon and eBay.

No matter what, TechRadar will have a laser focus on IFA as well as Gamescom for Turing's debut.

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July 27, 2018 at 10:32PM
Joe Osborne