Nvidia RTX 3080 Ti GPU could go on sale mid-April, aiming to combat crypto-miners

Another rumor that insists memory loadout will be 12GB, not 20GB

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Nvidia’s RTX 3080 Ti graphics cardcould be rapidly disappearing off shelves in just a month from now, according to the latest rumor.

As reported byChannelGate(spotted byMyDrivers), the RTX 3080 Ti is expected to go on sale come mid-April. The month of April was the purported release timeframe according to thelatest rumor we heard about the 3080 Ti, and this new piece of speculation backs up everything that this previous rumor asserted.

Namely that it’s doubtful the RTX 3080 Ti will be loaded up with 20GB of VRAM, a possibilitywidely floated on the GPU grapevine in the past, with the likelihood now being that the graphics card will run with a memory loadout of 12GB (pinches of condiments at the ready, of course, concerning all this and indeed the purported launch date).

The 3080 Ti supposedly also runs with slightly fewer CUDA cores, going by the latest rumors, withNvidiaplanning to equip the GPU with 10,240 rather than the previously rumored 10,496 cores (again as well-known hardware leaker @kopite7kimi has insisted on Twitter in the past). And, once again, this new rumor also repeats the claim that the 12GB of GDDR6X VRAM configuration points to a 384-bit memory bus for the incoming 3080 Ti variant.

Time will tell, and if that middle of April date proves on the money, we won’t have long to wait to see the truth of the matter. Indeed, if a launch is that close, we’d imagine that we’ll be hearing a good deal more from the rumor mill in short order.

Crypto-nite for miners?

ChannelGate further insists that Nvidia is planning to limit the crypto-mining capabilities of the new GPU, which is certainly a possibility, and again a move that @kopite7kimi believes will happen, airing that opinion previously on Twitter just over a week ago.Supposedly this mining limiter will be applied to the 3070 Ti, too, when that arrives, and therefore maybe all Nvidia’s future GPUs could be restricted in such a manner.

The recently launched RTX 3060 graphics card came with a mining nerf, but there are certainly thorny problems around applying these limitations, and some Chinese cryptocurrency miners are reportedlyalready using customized mods to get around Nvidia’s restrictions(not to mention that there may be legal issues around this anti-mining initiative).

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Via@momomo_us,Notebookcheck.net

Darren is a freelancer writing news and features for TechRadar (and occasionally T3) across a broad range of computing topics including CPUs, GPUs, various other hardware, VPNs, antivirus and more. He has written about tech for the best part of three decades, and writes books in his spare time (his debut novel - ‘I Know What You Did Last Supper’ - was published by Hachette UK in 2013).

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