Ampere Discussion Thread

[SteelCrysis]

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/how-th...aunch-mass

In an article published yesterday, PC Mag spoke to the people behind Bounce Alerts, as well as a few of their customers, about how the company’s automated purchasing bots work. For the uninitiated, Bounce Alerts is a service that members can subscribe to for $75 a month which then gives them access to scripts that monitor store pages and automatically purchase items when they go in stock. The company first sprung up in the sneakers market, but there’s nothing stopping savvy resellers from applying it to tech as well.
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A Bounce Alerts member was a bit more candid with the publication, giving the magazine insight into the actual bot ordering process. The member said that the bot works by running “an automated script to run basically from the product page to payment information and then to checkout.” They added that there it does have a noticeable flaw, though, in that the product page needs to stay live for the bot to keep working- “Whenever the site died [from too much traffic], I would have to restart the script and hope for it just to get through on the next one.”
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Nvidia declined to comment on Bounce Alerts’ bots when PC Mag reached out with questions, but did tell the publication that it is manually reviewing RTX 3080 orders to try to weed out scalpers and bots. The GPU maker also told the outlet that it does limit RTX 3080 orders to one per customer, though Bounce Alerts countered that it’s come up with ways to circumvent these limits.

With the pandemic limiting customers from just going to brick and mortar stores to snatch up purchases by hand, product launches are more vulnerable to online bot orders than ever. Like in high frequency stock trading, even the fastest, most diligent customers can’t hope to keep up with the speeds these bots have. If manufacturers want their products to actually make their way to people who intend to use them rather than just mark them up, they’re going to have to up their anti-scalping protections, and fast.

https://www.extremetech.com/gaming/31521...080-launch

Those who tried to purchase Nvidia’s Founders Edition cards found the Nvidia site to be unreliable. Even when they did manage to get a GPU in their carts, they would be unable to complete the transaction. As PC gamers started to simmer over the apparently botched launch, the resellers were gloating on Twitter.
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Nvidia claims it has a policy of limiting purchases per customer, but it would appear Bounce Alerts found a workaround. There’s no reason Nvidia should be sending 42 order confirmations to one email — that’s pretty clear evidence something is up. Nvidia says it will go through and manually confirm orders, which we can only hope will cause these resellers to lose their ill-gotten merchandise. It hasn’t been specific about what, if anything, it will do to prevent more bot orders in the future. In the meantime, don’t buy overpriced video cards from resellers. The restocks will come, and you don’t want to reward this kind of operation.

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/rtx-30...ock-record

The GeForce RTX 3080, which is the current performance king of graphics cards, is also a stud in overclocking. The Ampere-powered graphics card (via Wccftech) has set new world recorlds in 3DMark's Time Spy and Port Royal benchmark.

Brazilian overclocking legend Ronaldo "Rbuass" Buassali pushed his Galax GeForce RTX 3080 SG to 2,340 MHz to secure the first place on the Port Royal leaderboard. Time Spy is a bit more demanding so the avid overclocker dropped the GPU core clock to 2,130 MHz. Nevertheless, it was fast enough to allow Buassali to set a new world record in Time Spy as well. Interestingly, the GeForce RTX 3080's memory remained untouched in both runs so when Buassali gets around to overclocking it, the scores should improve.

Despite the fact that the GeForce RTX 3080 went on sale yesterday, some manufacturers still haven't updated the product pages for their flagship models. With the information that we have so far, the MSI GeForce RTX 3080 Gaming X Trio 10G appears to be the fastest custom GeForce RTX 3080 on the market so far with a boost clock that tops out at 1,815 MHz. So, Buassali's overclocked GeForce RTX 3080 was running up to 28.9% faster than MSI's over-engineered model. However, the overclocker was likely using exotic cooling, such as liquid nitrogen to keep his graphics card's temperature under check.

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/report...until-2021

According to the outlet, the limited availability at launch wouldn't just affect the GeForce RTX 3080, which is the new king of gaming graphics cards, but the entire Ampere product stack. We can't say we didn't see it coming, though, since there were early signs of the GeForce RTX 30-series having a tight supply problem. For one, no retailer is accepting preorders for Ampere, which means everyone has the same chance of securing a graphics card at launch time. Sadly, this has also opened the floodgates for scalpers to capitalize on the situation with the GeForce RTX 3080 release. Furthermore, mainstream Ampere relies on a custom Samsung 8nm process node, which might require a bit of time for yields to improve. The global supply chain disruptions from the coronavirus pandemic likely also play a role, too.

According to the Commercial Times report, the short supply originated in the second quarter of this year. Initially, the transition from Turing to Ampere slowed down the production schedule. Consequently, the shortage of other components contributed to elongating the schedule and negatively impacting delivery times. The lead time for Ampere is estimated to have increased by two to three weeks. There is hope that it will improve in the fourth quarter, though.

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/gigaby...0gb-models

Nvidia's been busy this quarter pumping out new Ampere GPUs. The RTX 3080 debuted this week, with the RTX 3090 and RTX 3070 close behind it. But it looks like Nvidia could be bringing even more Ampere cards to market. As spotted by VideoCardz, Gigabyte has leaked three unannounced GPUs: the RTX 3060 Ti, RTX 3080 20GB and RTX 3070 16GB.

In the model numbers, you can see the unknown SKUs featuring an "S" at the end of the Ampere numbering scheme. The "S" could stand for "Super," like the last generation or it could possibly stand for "Ti." In any case, these GPUs will be more advanced models of their base tier SKUs as they strive to be some of the best graphics cards available to PC gamers.
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VideoCardz believes the RTX 3080 20GB and RTX 307016GB will arrive sometime after AMD's RDNA 2 launch, with the RTX 3060 Ti arriving earlier, more specifically in late October.

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/gigaby...blower-gpu

The GeForce RTX 3090, poised to be one of the fastest and best graphics cards on the planet, will hit stores on September 24 for $1,499. Gigabyte is one of the first, if not the only, brave vendor to release a GeForce RTX 3090 with a blower-style design.
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However, the biggest concern we have with the GeForce RTX 3090 Turbo 24G is not the cooler itself, but Ampere's large appetite for power. The GeForce RTX 3090 is rated for 350W, so some will question whether a blower design can keep the beast under control. Manufacturers could more easily get away with a blower design on the GeForce RTX 3070, which is rated for 220W, but a blower on a GeForce RTX 3090 sounds like a gamble.
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Not that it changes anything power-wise, but Gigabyte opted for two normal 8-pin PCIe power connectors rather than Nvidia's 12-pin PCIe power connector. The manufacturer conveniently placed both connectors at the rear of the graphics card.

https://www.techpowerup.com/272312/nvidi...be-a-novel

In other corners of the Internet, however, expectations were met and attempts flourished. These seem to have been mostly met by scalpers, though, so there is nothing idyllic in this particular painting - it's more akin to Edvard Munch's The Scream than it is Vincent Van Gogh's Starry Night. On eBay, an RTX 3080 card was allegedly sold for 70,000$ - a particularly criminal act, if I've ever seen one. It's also common, right now, to see some of these going for prices ranging between $1,300 and $5,000 - and at this point, this writer feels he's almost out of metaphors for this particular situation. Apparently, a service named Bounce Alerts was used - it appears that most RTX 3080 orders were done through this service, which automatically bought as much RTX 3080 stock as it could from wherever they were sold. A user reported having acquired some 42 RTX 3080's from the NVIDIA store before stock ran out. There are even bots designed to bid on eBay sales so as to waste scalpers' time and make orders that will never be fulfilled - a sort of poetic justice, if you may, though I don't believe the kind Shakespeare himself would have conceived of.