New Turing dies set to put an end to the "two-tier" system for RTX cards

Tech blogs and sites have been aware that NVIDIA's RTX cards are affected by a "class system" since these GPUs started hitting the market. This system stems from the existence of 2 variants of the same Turing (TU104 or TU106) chips.

For example, there is such a thing as a TU104-400-A1 chip - and also such a thing as a TU104-400A-A1 chip. The first "A" in this nomenclature is what differentiates the two. These variants tend to be found in higher-end products that can be overclocked, whereas the "non-As" are often in lower-end cards that are not rated for the same.

For example, the TU104-400-A1 chip was found to be incorporated in the basic ASUS RTX 2080 Turbo card, whereas the TU104-400A-A1 featured in its ROG Strix counterpart. Then again, this is not necessarily a hard and fast rule: a kind of OC-mode chip lottery is also possibly in effect when buying RTX cards thanks to this dichotomy.

A contributor to TomsHardware.de claims to have exclusive information on new variants of Turing GPUs. They are apparently to be called the TU104-410 & TU106-410 series of chips - and that's it: no "A-class" sub-variants here.

The correspondent (Igor Wallossek) also now projects that overclockability will be constant across these new series. Therefore, a shift to these new dies among manufacturers may render more effective and flexible RTX performance more affordable in the future.