MSI has just registered a bunch of incoming Nvidia graphics cards – presumably next-gen Ampere models, of course – with the EEC (Eurasian Economic Commission), something that usually happens just before hardware is launched.
And with Nvidia’s Ampere launch expected to happen on September 1, less than a week away now, everyone is jumping on what's coming out of the rumor mill to try and glean potential info about what will theoretically be the RTX 3000 series graphics cards.
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So what can we discern from this latest spillage? Nothing on the potential specs, sadly, but MSI has registered some 29 graphics cards in the EEC database, with three main GPU models.
Codename theorizing
As PC Gamer reports, the relevant codenames are 602-V388, 602-V389, and 602-V390, which obviously don’t mean much by themselves. With the present RTX 2000 family, MSI used lower numbers for higher-end cards, so given that, we can theorize that the 602-V388 is the purported GeForce RTX 3090 (or whatever the flagship might end up being called), with the 602-V389 being the RTX 3080, and the 602-V388 corresponding to the RTX 3070.
There are all manner of variations (29 in total, as mentioned) within these three models, but far fewer when it comes to the flagship (just four), which makes sense.
Don’t expect a bunch of graphics cards from MSI right at launch, by the way – variants will be pushed out down the line, or indeed might never see the light of day (a product being registered doesn’t necessarily mean it will be released, just that the current plan is to do so).
That’s about all we can get from this particular leak, but MSI implementing the registration process itself is definitely another firm sign that we are about to see the next-gen Ampere cards from Nvidia.
Unsurprisingly, a whole host of rumors about Ampere GPUs have been popping up in the last couple of weeks, and certainly the RTX 3090 promises some beefy specs, but leaks are also pointing to it being a massive card, with some equally beefy power demands (and a new power connector requiring an adaptor too).
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