Today Videocardz.com reported on findings at the Eurasian Economic Commission (ECC) website that list new unannounced Ampere RTX 3000 series graphics cards from Asus and Gigabyte. As with all ECC listings, some of these entries could merely be placeholders that won't make it to market. But the listings do give us a taste of things to possibly come.
Both Asus and Gigabyte have already revealed their main lineups, but now we have info on more exotic SKUs that might come to market, from liquid cooled variants to highly-overclocked models.
Asus's ROG Strix and TUF series will reportedly include TOP and Advanced SKUs for the RTX 3090, RTX 3080, and RTX 3070. Asus's TOP SKUs are usually the highest clocked variants, while the Advanced models will be the "middle-ground" variant, clocked below the TOP models, but above the base trims.
The Dual series will be a bit different. According to the ECC listing, the Dual series is only for RTX 3070 GPUs (at least for now), and there's no mention of when or if Asus will make RTX 3080 and above SKUs. This is presumably due to the RTX 3080's and 3090's high wattage TDP ratings. The Dual will have an Advanced SKU and an Evo SKU. Evo SKUs typically have some minor design changes in the shroud or cooler itself.
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Asus is also preparing new EK and KO lineups for Ampere. However, there's no mention yet on what these cards will be designed for. There are a lot of possibilities; they could be water-cooled solutions like a custom block or AIO, or perhaps mini-itx form factor cards for RTX 3080 and 3090. But we won't know for sure until Asus announces them officially.
Lastly, Asus is making a surprise return with its blower-style Turbo cards. This is surprising given the RTX 3080 and 3090s large power requirements – blowers are notorious for being weak at cooling large and power-hungry GPUs. Maybe this time Asus can make a good name for blower-style cards.
Meanwhile, Gigabyte has several lineups in the works as well, most noticeably the Xtreme, Master, Vision, Turbo series and liquid-cooled SKUs.
Fortunately, Gigabyte released some basic info on the cooler designs for the AORUS Xtreme and Master series during a recent livestream. Most noticeably, these cards will feature massive heatsinks, so much so that Aorus reps mentioned the 3090 SKUs could be quad-slot cards. If true, the Aorus RTX 3090s will be the thickest graphics cards in history.
The ECC listing implies the Master and Xtreme will not be limited to the RTX 3090 and RTX 3080; the RTX 3070 will receive the same treatment. Water block and AIO designs are also listed, named the W and WB series.
Gigabyte's Gaming and Eagle series of cards will be the company's mainstream lineups, targeted towards the more casual consumer. If you want more info about these cards, check out our coverage of them here.
Next up is the Vision series, which is Gigabyte's content creation lineup aimed towards the prosumer market. This is the first time we've seen it come to graphics cards; so far, it has been released to Gigabyte motherboards alone. This makes sense as Nvidia designed the Ampere GPUs for content creation just as much as gaming.
Just like Asus, Gigabyte's Turbo series could come with another blower-style cooler design. Again, it'll be interesting to see how these coolers cope with top-trim Ampere GPUs. Surprisingly, only RTX 3080 and RTX 3090 models are listed – no RTX 3070s so far.
Again, most of these SKUs are unannounced, some listings posted to the ECC never come to market, and all we know so far are the possible model numbers. With the launch of the RTX 3090 this month, it shouldn't be too long before Asus and Gigabyte give full details on their entire selection of RTX 30-series graphics cards.
