Now that the reference cards don't have the blower coolers they are a lot more tempting. I'd still wait for reviews to see how loud they are though.

Up to now, OEM/AIC/AIB cards had quieter cooling systems, but they also make you pay for the silly graphics, the RGB, etc. I don't think the overclocking ability is really that much better. A quiet reference design with a non-blower cooler and a good warranty is what I've always wanted.

Yeah, NVIDIA makes blower again. RTX 2000 FE lacks blower design.

That flow-through cooling looks like it would be really good though. I might go for the FE cards this time around.

I have a Micro-ATX case for my PC and am a little skeptical that flow-through would well for that form factor because the intakes are on the bottom of the card.

It will probably be fine. I've used powerful graphics cards in super-cramped ITX cases and didn't have a problem. I think people overestimate how much cooling these things really need.

Any temps below 80C at load are perfectly safe and shouldn't result in throttling -- the same is true for CPUs. If you aim for lower temps than 80C, you aren't going to get better performance, although lower temps are a good way to get your computer to run more quietly.

>If you aim for lower temps than 80C, you aren't going to get better performance

You're not directly going to get better performance, but you can run higher clocks for longer before throttling, leading to higher performance.

True - in my case I have intake fans at the bottom too so I was excited to see that

Not at all. The 20 series has excellent founders cards.

I could be wrong - but I believe Nvidia bins the chips for Founders Edition cards

I know for the 20 series Nvidia supplies AIB's like EVGA with binned chips too, higher end cards had GPU's with slightly different model numbers that typically clocked better. They probably do the same for all the different card makers.

What does it mean to bin a chip?

Basically, after the chips are manufactured, they're not 100% uniform. Some have better performance, some have worse.

In this case, it means they're reserving the best chips for the founders cards. In other cases, there have been instances where a company has two products, a high end and a low end (or medium, etc). In some of those cases, people have investigated and the chips are actually exactly the same, but the lower end product will have a core disabled or similar, depending on the exact product. That'll happen a lot of the time when the company has yield issues where too many of the chips don't have acceptable performance or one part of the chip is just broken. They'll disable the broken portion and boom, the lower end product is born. That's still a net win for them because the alternate is either to throw the entire thing away or spend more time improving the yield.

chip manufacturing is an imperfect process, and so there is variance in performance/viability of all of the hardware on a chip. the higher performing chips are "binned" for the top end of the price point, while the lower performing chips are either binned for lower performance or have some of their functionality disabled. For contrived example, A company may produce nothing but quad core chips but sell those with some cores that don't meet minimum performance as dual cores with the bad cores physically disabled.

they cherry-pick their best silicon so you can run them at higher speeds if you're overclocking or lower voltage if you want cooler temperatures and less power consumption at stock speeds.

There's always a ton of speculation about it, I've seen the claim NVIDIA bins for FE cards and factory overclocked AIB cards together

At the end of the day it doesn't really matter, you're paying a FE premium for early access mostly.

On the plus side, this time the FE card might have a top tier cooling solution, which is why I'll probably be caving to their FE tax (and probably plenty of others, focusing on cooling was a smart move)

I don’t believe it, old reference fans were optimized for static pressure on server chassis and gaming cards optimize for low speed high volume airflow, I think.

I'm confused, wouldn't FE be considered OEM?

The terminology is a bit confusing: OEM in this context is referring to aftermarket (NVIDIA partners) cards. It's referred to as "OEM" because the aftermarket cards come from OEMs like Asus, EVGA, etc.

It's disappointing for me. The 970 launched at $330. I bought my 1070 at the launch price of $400. The 3070 is $500. I don't like this trend.

A rough inflation guess is 330 six years ago is 363 today. The 3060, which is still a relative monster, will set you back 400.

My last gaming computer took me 9 years along with only an SSD addition, RAM upgrade, and video card change halfway through. It was only Microsoft Flight Simulator that made me jump up and damn... my timing was a just a little too early on the beefy video card.

How can you call the 3060 a monster when its specs haven't been released, let alone real benchmarks? For that matter the price isn't official either.