Report: GTX 880 PCB Pictured
Images have been posted of what may be the PCB of the upcoming Nvidia GTX 880 graphics card. We cannot be certain, but this is what the report claims. The original report stems from the Chinese website MyDrivers.com, which is not a source we've come across before. Most of the PCB is blurred out in the images, but the details that we do get to see are the GPU, the memory, the SLI fingers, and the power connectors. We'll start off with the GPU.
The most relevant bits of information on the GPU are Nvidia, Taiwan, and 1421A1. The Taiwan label tells us that it is probably a TSMC fabricated chip, while the 1421A1 label tells us that the chip was baked on the 21st week of 2014. A1 is the version number. Overall, we cannot deduce which chip this is, as it could be either a GM204 chip or a bigger GM210 chip. We do suspect that it is a new Maxwell chip, because for an older chip we'd expect a higher version number.
The memory on the card is presented as 16 GB of GDDR5 memory, with each side of the PCB revealing eight 1 GB chips. This tells us that this is almost certainly a development card, as we really do not expect a retail consumer card, no matter how high-end, to come with such a large amount of memory. Realistically, we would expect 4 GB of memory to be present on the final version of the supposed GTX 880 graphics card.
Lastly, the images also reveal that the card has two six-pin PCIe power connectors accompanied by a single 8-pin power connector. This is more than the GTX 780 Ti features, and given that Maxwell will be more efficient, we suspect that this is once again because this might be a test PCB.
All said, this might not even be the GTX 880, and these rumors don't really tell us anything believable. As it stands, we believe the specifications for the GTX 880 that are most believable are that it will pack a GM204 GPU with 3200 CUDA cores along with 4 GB of GDDR5 memory which runs over a 256-bit memory interface. Take this rumor of the card carrying 16 GB of memory with a pinch of salt.
There was also a rumor a few weeks ago about the GTX 880 and GTX 880 Ti being cheaper than the GTX 780 Ti, which we find questionable at best.
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Niels Broekhuijsen is a Contributing Writer for Tom's Hardware US. He reviews cases, water cooling and pc builds.
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clutchc I guess by removing a zero, Nvidia can start over and recycle the 8800 moniker again... lol.Reply -
Memnarchon Well if GTX880 will be a GM104 chip and not a flagship GM100/110 chip then its obvious that it will be cheaper like GTX680. Around $500.Reply
At $500 is cheaper than GTX780ti and it should give more performance (around 30% I believe which would come with the greater perf per watt, moar cores and with what GTX750 showed us, more Hz..). -
Lutfij Must be a cream of the crop edition card since from the picture it will need 2x8pin connectors and a 1x6 pin connector. Oversized PCB like the EVGA KPE card.Reply
Please pass the salt shaker! -
The_Icon 4GB is entry for today's high GPU bandwidth games like Watch Dogs, thanks to console's unified 8GB memory, games are using more and more GPU memory. I expect nothing less than 6GB, most likely 8GB.Reply -
mouse24 Reply4GB is entry for today's high GPU bandwidth games like Watch Dogs, thanks to console's unified 8GB memory, games are using more and more GPU memory. I expect nothing less than 6GB, most likely 8GB.
Thats... Not right at all. Just because a console has 8gb of vram doesn't mean it has anything close to the power required to fill it up, most of its used for other things, remember its shared with system ram.