The latest Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 12 GB graphics cards, sporting an increased GDDR6X memory pool compared to the original RTX 3080 10 GB cards, appeared, somewhat briefly for sale in Europe. But "blink and you miss it" and the cards are now delisted. Hat tip to Videocardz.
German retailer Mindfactory listed two different MSI graphics cards - the MSI RTX 3080 Gaming Z Lite Hash Rate (LHR), and the MSI RTX 3080 Suprim X LHR. The cards had starting prices set at a colossal €1,699 (~$1926). Another retailer, this time based in France, also listed the Gaming Z model from MSI at the same €1,699 price-point. The retailers have unfortunately brought down the links already - but that's where the magic of screenshots becomes relevant, as you can see in the listings below.
The GeForce RTX 3080 12 GB cards have had a somewhat unusual "launch", with no official word from Nvidia on its specifications or even an MSRP value. Considering recent pricing practices from AIB partners - and the absence of an Nvidia Founders Edition card - it seems that Nvidia's board partners were given free rein to price their graphics cards according to the already established "new normal" of pricing for the best graphics cards in the context of severe demand paired with supply constraints.
Unfortunately, none of the retailers actually listed the cards' specifications beyond the 12 GB of VRAM and the expected LHR cryptocurrency mining limitation. This means that there's still no information other than what has been made public through leaks and rumors on the new Nvidia graphics card, a process that began around two months ago. Naturally, that means that rumored specifications are all we have at the moment - and those must always be taken with a grain of salt.
Even so, the current expectation for Nvidia's latest RTX 3080 12 GB cards is that it should still retain the GA-102 GPU from the RTX 3080, albeit with an additional two Streaming Multiprocessor (SM) clusters, bringing the computing power of the card up to 8,960 CUDA cores, 280 Tensor cores, and 70 RT cores (compared to the RTX 3080 10 GB's 8,704 CUDA cores, 272 Tensor cores, and 68 RT cores) for an additional, on-paper 3% increase in computing resources. The increased VRAM capacity is a given at this time, although there are still questions surrounding the operating speed of the 12 GB GDDR6X VRAM banks - they likely still operate at the same 19 Gbps as in the original RTX 3080. An increase in the width of the memory interface (384-bit in the RTX 3080 12 GB compared to 320-bit in the RTX 3080 10 GB) is also rumored, which would unlock a 912.4 GBps memory bandwidth (20% higher than the RTX 3080's).
