GamersNexus discovers Nvidia's secret highly binned 2070 chip | Not all 2070s are made equal

[AlTech]

GamersNexus has discovered Nvidia's secret highly binned RTX 2070 chip.

 

Regular RTX 2070s feature the low end TU106-400-A1 chip.

 

Nvidia appears to be offering AIBs a new chip named TU106-400A-A1 which is more highly binned and is being offered at a Premium compared to the regular TU106 low end chip.

 

GamersNexus investigated the new chip and discovered that it has better thermals, better overclockability, and generally similar power consumption whilst at higher clockspeeds.

 

Cards with the 400A variant which are highly binned appear to be the cards costing $599 or more whilst regular 400 variant chips are in the 2070s selling for $499 or above.

 

This means it may not be possible to get a 2070 for $499 and OC it to the performance of a 2070 costing $599.

 

The peformance segmentation within the 2070 product is now pronounced and not all 2070s will perform equally.

 

In one scenario a 2070 with the 400A chip performed 5-10% faster than a card with the 400 chip.

 

I think this is completely stupid to segment both within the 2070 product name.

 

Source:

 

[Origami Cactus]

Now we just need an rtx 2070 5gb, rtx 2070 3gb, rtx 2070 ddr4 and rtx 2070 6gb.

Also a version with raytracing cores disabled called the gtx 2070. Thanks @PatXioPC for the idea.

[asus killer]

isn't this a normal thing? lately jay and steve where on a competition for 3dmark and jay's cpu outperformed steve's by a lot.

[AlTech]

Just now, asus killer said:

isn't this a normal thing? lately jay and steve where on a competition for 3dmark and jay's cpu outperformed steve's by a lot.

Usually they all are the same chip and AIBs sorts these in bins and do stuff that way using good ones in expensive cards.

 

Now Nvidia is holding back the good chips from AIBs on purpose to extort more money from them.

[ImNotThere]

obviously just infrastructure for the 2070 ti kappa

 

[asus killer]

3 minutes ago, AluminiumTech said:

Usually they all are the same chip and AIBs sorts these in bins and do stuff that way using good ones in expensive cards.

 

Now Nvidia is holding back the good chips from AIBs on purpose to extort more money from them.

but is it a confirmed thing or a "steve said so" thing? (the price difference i mean)

 

 

[AlTech]

4 minutes ago, Origami Cactus said:

Now we just need an rtx 2070 5gb, rtx 2070 3gb, rtx 2070 ddr4 and rtx 2070 6gb.

Considering it uses TU106 I expect so .

[RollTime]

So it's the 8086k but sneakier.

[sazrocks]

Intel: “Look at how much profit margin we have!”

Nvidia: “Hold my beer.”

[AlTech]

Just now, asus killer said:

but is it a confirmed thing or a "steve said so" thing? (the price difference i mean)

AIBs have told Steve off the record I believe.

[asus killer]

1 minute ago, AluminiumTech said:

AIBs have told Steve off the record I believe.

ok, but if AIB's always used higher binned gpu's to push the price to consumers, why should Nvidia not charge them more in the 1st place. To me seems fair. Why should only AIB's benefit from it when it's Nvidia GPU?

[AlTech]

1 minute ago, asus killer said:

ok, but if AIB's always used higher binned gpu's to push the price to consumers, why should Nvidia not charge them more in the 1st place. To me seems fair. Why should only AIB's benefit from it when it's Nvidia GPU?

The problem is that currently Nvidia's markup is wayyy higher than the markup AIBs ever put.

 

Some AIBs have told Steve that the profit margins are super tiny on the 20 series cards because Nvidia is charging so much.

[PatXioPC]

15 minutes ago, Origami Cactus said:

Now we just need an rtx 2070 5gb, rtx 2070 3gb, rtx 2070 ddr4 and rtx 2070 6gb.

Where's the RT dumped out GTX 2070?

[Origami Cactus]

1 minute ago, PatXioPC said:

Where's the RT dumped out GTX 2070?

Sorry, i forgot. I will add it to the list shortly.

[Spotty]

11 minutes ago, asus killer said:

isn't this a normal thing? lately jay and steve where on a competition for 3dmark and jay's cpu outperformed steve's by a lot.

In the case of their CPUs that came down to good old fashioned silicon lottery. It's been mentioned numerous times that Jay's 7980xe is a "golden sample", even derbauer said he was impressed with how well it overclocks.

 

You'll always have some dies perform slightly better than others sure to the way they're manufactured. In the past it was just a lottery whether you'd get a good chip or a bad chip, you'd still pay the same price and they won't be marked/branded differently. Now though, Nvidia is separating the good from the bad and selling them to AIB partners at different prices. A little bit similar to how the 8086k is a binned 8700k.

 

I don't care that Nvidia are doing this. I feel like I should care, but honestly most of the people wanting to overclock are going to buy the more expensive skus like the strix or ftw cards with the better vrms and better coolers anyway. Those who don't care about overclocking will just buy whatever card is cheaper and put it in to their machine and never touch it again, happy as long as fortnite runs at 300fps on their 1080p60hz monitor.

[Brooksie359]

18 minutes ago, AluminiumTech said:

Usually they all are the same chip and AIBs sorts these in bins and do stuff that way using good ones in expensive cards.

 

Now Nvidia is holding back the good chips from AIBs on purpose to extort more money from them.

They talked about this a long time ago near launch that nvidia would do binning on all chips and sell the better chips at a higher price. I am unsure how this is even news. It's not even that big of a difference once both are overclocked. 

[Syntaxvgm]

Forcing AIBs to sit in the back of the bin is unjust. All OEMs should be treated equally! 

[Froody129]

So it's a 2070ti? If an AIB wanted to make a sneaky buck they could just price the normal chip at the higher price and people will assume that it is the binned version

 

[Tech Enthusiast]

So, people getting hurt over something that has happened for about,... forever.

 

NVidia doing the extreme binning now only means one thing:

Costumer now KNOW they will get a better chip if they pay more.

Before this, you could go out, buy a 1000$ 1080 ti and get the same value as that other guy, paying 750 for his 1080ti.

Sure, it could also go the other way and you could land a big silicone lottery win, but who enjoyed that "luck"?

 

I see no reason to get angry over this now. It is better for us costumers and not worse. 

[Mira Yurizaki]

I don't think NVIDIA needs to create another GPU SKU like a "2070 Ti" or whatever when the performance difference as observed is up to 10%. It's bad enough that AIBs have like a half dozen SKUs of the GPU placed on different board layouts.

 

If anything, this would ensure that the higher binned GPUs are placed where they're actually useful: in higher end board SKUs. Otherwise playing the silicon lottery by say getting a lower end board SKU and hoping for the best doesn't really make sense because the board would 1. have worse power delivery circuitry and 2. likely have worse cooling, especially if you got "lucky" enough to win the silicon lottery in say an MSI Aero model.

 

I mean, didn't AMD do something like this with the R9 Fury series?

[SADS]

The problem here is that you're paying so much extra as a customer.

If you want a 2080ti, thats a (very) premium product, you're then expected to pay an extra premium for a core that could have cost you the same before the binning. Whilst this is good if you want to buy that top top chip, its effectively punishing the people that were perfectly willing to try their luck with an unbinned chip and pay less. Or even those that just want the chip and board and will cool and tweak the card up to its limits.

As an enthusiast, you would probably feel a bit shitty if you bought a top end card and it wasn't actually performing as good as it 'could'. Before you could try some tweaking and squeeze out what that chip was capable of, now NV are putting a hard limit on you and making you pay a premium to remove it.

 

I don't have a problem with paying a premium for a product, I usually buy top end products, but when its a premium on top of a premium (and a now hugely inflated one), its not the premium that is the issue but the value to the customer that is getting really bad.

When you're paying extra for the top end card, you shouldn't have to spend extra on top of that as well.

Especially when nothing sells for MSRP anyway.

Edited November 5, 2018 by SADS
grammar

[AlTech]

32 minutes ago, M.Yurizaki said:

I mean, didn't AMD do something like this with the R9 Fury series?

No.

 

They've never created a dedicated variant of a chip knowingly which is higher binned within a series.

[Mira Yurizaki]

1 minute ago, AluminiumTech said:

No.

 

They've never created a dedicated variant of a chip knowingly which is higher binned within a series.

I don't think NVIDIA is creating a dedicated variant. They're applying a different label to differentiate which TU-106s are better than others.

[BuckGup]

This is bad as you could market lower end binned chips for higher end cards

[Sauron]

2 hours ago, AluminiumTech said:

Usually they all are the same chip and AIBs sorts these in bins and do stuff that way using good ones in expensive cards.

 

Now Nvidia is holding back the good chips from AIBs on purpose to extort more money from them.

for the customers it's probably the same thing, it costs money to buy a batch of chips and then only sell the "good" ones