Board partners say goodbye to RTX 4080 12GB
A quick check of the RTX 4080 12GB situation shows that even board partners had no idea what was coming.
Yesterday, NVIDIA announced that it is canceling its RTX 4080 12GB graphics card, an AD104-based model with 25% fewer cores than the appropriate 16GB card with AD103 GPU. The company is now likely to launch the same card under a different name, which was teased somewhat in the official “unlaunching” post.
However, the facts are that the AD104-400 GPU has no launch date and no name. This means that board partners are now also forced to unlaunch their RTX 4080 12GB cards. We look at the situation as it evolves.
Board partners clearly had no idea what was coming to the end, and this is easily verified by checking their websites. The good news is that the vast majority of AIBs haven’t even bothered to list RTX 4080 12GB cards yet.
MSI was one of the first brands to list RTX 4080 12GB and as shown below these cards are still around, all four in fact.
MSI GeForce RTX 4080 12GB, Source: MSI
ASUS, Gigabyte, Palit are in a better situation because they never listed a model. In many cases we can still find traces of the 12GB model in official announcements/press releases, such as in this example:
Palit GeForce RTX 4080 12GB, Source: Palit
This week, PNY has become the first company to list the full RTX 4080 12GB specs, packaging design and so on. The “PNY GeForce RTX 4080 XLR8 VERTO EPIC-X RGB Triple Fan” would be launched with optional factory overclocks and would operate at 2670 MHz (+60 MHz). This was the first and only RTX 4080 12GB model with full specs.
We were quick to snap photos, including the new packaging design, which will now never be used:
Inno3D GeForce RTX 4080 12GB, Source: Inno3D
Obviously board partners had no idea what’s going to happen on Friday. There were only rumors about possible delays, but honestly this happens all the time. NVIDIA was quick to remove any mention of the 12GB model from all charts, documentation, and product pages. This took less than 24 hours.
Goodbye RTX 4080 12GB, hello RTX 4070 Ti?