This site may earn affiliate commissions from the links on this page. Terms of use.

nno3D-Feature

If y'all've wanted to buy a consumer GPU these past few months, you lot've had nothing only tough choices to make. Current loftier-finish cards from AMD and Nvidia are desperately overpriced thanks to ongoing pressure from the cryptocurrency market. It'due south a circuitous situation with a lot of moving parts, but the PC market place, generally speaking, isn't used to these kinds of shortages. There's news that Nvidia is prepping some crypto-focused cards that could take pressure off the mainstream marketplace — but it'south only going to work if the marketplace remains relatively tame.

The specs on the Inno3D P102-100 units, co-ordinate to Cryptomining-blog, are as follows:

  • CUDA Cores: 3200
  • Base of operations Clock: 1582 MHz
  • Retentiveness Clock: eleven Gbps
  • Physical Memory Size: five GB
  • Memory Type: GDDR5X
  • Memory Interface Width: 320-flake
  • Memory Bandwidth: 400 GB/south
  • Autobus Support: PCIe Gen1 x4
  • Card Size: 21.5 cm length, 12.5 cm height, dual slot
  • Max TDP: 250 Watt
  • Power Connectors: 2x 8-pin PCI-E

Since the blog mentions a PCIe Gen 1 x4 bus connexion and that's rather clearly not an x4 bus above, presumably the carte is designed to be an x4 electrical connexion rather than an x16 (there's no problem with doing this on PCIe). The GP102 chip, by the mode, corresponds with the GTX 1080 Ti, admitting a trimmed configuration of three,200 CUDA cores instead of 3,584 cores.

As for why nosotros aren't all that bullish on new cryptocurrency cards relieving pressure level on the market place, it'due south elementary: The simply manner these cards can relieve the consumer infinite is if demand for them doesn't outstrip supply. And the but mode that happens is if cryptocurrency prices remain stable plenty that people stop stripping the marketplace similar locusts in a farm field.

GTX1080

"Wait at these amazing prices," said no i, ever.

The situation doesn't actually become meliorate in a hypothetical where nosotros imagine a new Nvidia consumer launch. In fact, it could snarl it worse. (AMD is excepted from this scenario only considering, with Vega yet relatively new, its adjacent loftier-end replacement cycle is farther away.) Fifty-fifty a hypothetical state of affairs in which Nvidia was willing to sell its tiptop-end silicon for less money than a full-fledged gaming GPU when in this configuration doesn't automatically assistance — if demand is high enough, miners volition guzzle up the cheap cards, and so gleefully rampage on the expensive models. And because Nvidia can't afford to simply sell top-end GPUs for rock-lesser prices, it's non going to spend a huge corporeality of time kicking out GP102 chips just then people can have affordable GTX 1060s or 1070s.

But if Nvidia does bring crypto-focused GPUs to the table, we tin can at to the lowest degree hope for an improvement to the condition quo, and a chip of time when affordable GPUs are at least closer to availability than they by and large are these days — assuming, of course, that the crypto market doesn't just curl upwards and die. If I sound a trivial grumpy well-nigh this problem, it's because I am a bit grumpy almost it. I'd vastly prefer this was a question of CPUs rather than GPUs, considering CPUs age more than slowly in general and definitely where gaming is considered. A Core i7-2600K can still plow in good gaming frame rates today — certainly higher frame rates than y'all'll encounter with a GPU from early 2022. Then again, we're already recommending people potentially consider a GPU from 2022 as an alternative to a mod card, so by this point in 2022 I might be back to recommending digging out an EVGA card and NEC MultiSync II monitor. Have yous considered the gaming potential of an 8-bit Atari computer? At that place's a world of possibility out there!

Ok, I exaggerate. Slightly. Here's hoping our mutual hobby gets a bit more affordable as a issue of this.