Other than news that our move into an office is nearly complete -- and that is big news, at least, for us -- the industry has been largely focused on GPUs for the past few weeks. NVidia's remaining 10-series GPU inventory has been purged down-channel to board partners, who are now working to drop 10-series video card prices in fire sales that lead into the RTX 20-series launch. We've also heard of Spectre and Meltdown again (it's been a while), with Intel pushing more microcode updates to assist in mitigating attack vectors. Those updates came with a brief "no benchmarks" clause, but that seems to have been addressed in the time since.

Separately: We'll be at PAX West this weekend for one day (Friday), and will be joining Corsair and PC World on a PC gaming panel at 7:00PM in the Sandworm Theater. Learn more here.

The show notes and article are below the video embed, if you prefer reading.

We had an opportunity to disassemble multiple EVGA RTX video cards, including the EVGA RTX 2080 and RTX 2080 Ti, the latter featuring assistance from Der8auer of Caseking’s booth. Our coverage is still going live as we edit, render, and upload, but the immediate news item pertains to die size.

Update: Added a correction for SM / CUDA Core numbers, now that full details have been leaked.

NVIDIA announced its new Turing video cards for gaming today, including the RTX 2080 Ti, RTX 2080, and RTX 2070. The cards move forward with an upgraded-but-familiar Volta architecture, with some changes to the SMs and memory. The new RTX 2080 and 2080 Ti ship with reference cards first, and partner cards largely at the same time (with some more advanced models coming 1+ month later), depending on which partner it is. The board partners did not receive pricing or even card naming until around the same time as media, so expect delays in custom solutions. Note that we were originally hearing a 1-3 month latency on partner cards, but that looks to be only for advanced models that are just now entering production. Most tri-fan models should come available on the same date.

Another major point of consideration is NVIDIA's decision to use a dual-axial reference card, eliminating much of the value of partner cards at the low-end. Moving away from blower reference cards and toward dual-fan cards will most immediately impact board partners, something that could lead to a slow crawl of NVIDIA expanding its direct-to-consumer sales and bypassing partners. The RTX 2080 Ti will be priced at $1200 and will launch on September 20, with the 2080 at $800 (and September 20), and the 2070 at $600 (TBD release date).

Hardware news for the past week has been largely dominated by GPU rumblings -- a good thing, given the multi-year gap between lion's share holder NVIDIA's Pascal. The company announced its NVIDIA Turing architecture for Quadro cards, an upgrade on Volta, and has teased the GeForce "RTX 2080" gaming graphics card in one of its videos. Turing will be the subject of heavy discussion come Gamescom, based on what NVIDIA has indicated from its public event schedule. On NVIDIA's coattails, Intel has also indicated a desired to push graphics -- with teasers pointing toward potential consumer dGPUs -- by the year 2020.

The hardware move didn't slow down for our move, it turns out. HW News for the past week includes a major focus on GV104 & GV102-branded GPUs listed in AIDA64's Device ID database, new R3 2000-series CPUs shown by Lenovo, Threadripper 2's specs, TSMC shutting down for a virus, and more. This is also our first video shot in the new space (though we're still doing sound treatment, so there's a bit of echo).