 I just heard Nvidia's got a sick new GPU for us to play with. Well, what part of that is wrong? Did we not get it? Or is there no new GPU? Yes. Wait. Oh, this is the RTX 2060 relaunch, isn't it? Yep. But... But why? Hey, goodbye now. You wanna talk about it? Yes. Yes, I do. And I wanna talk about our sponsor. MSI's new Mag Z690 Unified Motherboard supports the latest 12th Gen Intel Core CPUs, up to 6666 MHz DDR5 memory, and a stealthy black aesthetic. Check it out at the link below. Nvidia's new old stock GPU uses the same core layout as the RTX 2060 Super, but instead of that GPU's 8GB memory configuration, they're bumping it up to 12GB of GDDR6. At first glance, that might sound like a decent upgrade, but there's more to the story than just the size of the frame buffer alone. The available memory bandwidth? It's about the same as the RTX 2060 Super, but it's a little bit smaller than the RTX 2060 Super. It's a little bit smaller than the RTX 2060 Super, but it's a little bit smaller than the RTX 2060 Super, and the RTX 2060 Super is still being stifled by the original RTX 2060's 192-bit bus. So, in that respect, it's actually a step back from the RTX 2060 Super. That means this card should perform somewhere between the OG 2060 and the Super variant, rather than surpassing them, unless you have a specific need for the extra video memory. And you just might, to account for newer titles coming out with bigger and more varied assets, Nvidia would have seen fit to give the RTX 2060 some extra juice in the caboose, not to mention the marketing benefits. 12GB puts them on par with AMD, who has for some time been criticizing Nvidia's lower-end cards for their smaller frame buffers. If nothing else, at least it helps to ensure that anyone who's buying one of these RTX 2060's isn't stuck with all of the limitations of a three-year-old design. Obviously, you're not going to be cranking the visuals on these cards, but you're also not going to be scrambling to upgrade again in a year or so. Hmm. Maybe. We'd love to verify that, but we certainly can't today. Not only has Nvidia canned the Founders Edition that they briefly listed on their website, but we didn't get a card to review, and they haven't been talking to the press either, us included. As far as we could tell, this card was still a maybe-on-the-horizon rumor, as recently as last week. There's two ways you could look at this. First, obviously, we already know pretty much how the RTX 2060 performs, so reviews aren't likely to reveal anything mind-blowing. Maybe they felt it wasn't worth bothering. The second is more troubling. As of writing, I have no idea how much it costs. Each board partner is going to have their own SKUs with their own pricing, and Nvidia hasn't announced a baseline MSRP like they usually would, instead opting for the cryptic, it's a premium product, so it'll be priced accordingly. Line. It could be that this card will be very expensive, and they're trying to get out in front of a negative news cycle full of inevitable comparisons to the 30 series launch MSRPs. And to be fair to Nvidia, there's no real benefit to tech press, and subsequently consumers, yelling at them about how their MSRP doesn't exist when it's inevitably higher for most partner boards. Now, we've talked at length about why MSRPs have been rising and why the MSRPs that many GPUs originally launched at are functionally extinct, but the TLDR is that it's a combination of the ongoing chip shortage, raw materials skyrocketing in price thanks to COVID recovery and speculation, and just plain and simple supply and demand. It's becoming more expensive just to get the chips, let alone put it all together, and this cost isn't going away anytime soon. Nvidia sells GPUs to everyone else so that they can eat that cost then, but partners don't have the luxury of selling loss leaders. Oh, this is interesting. I just got a response from Asus. Apparently they don't know what the MSRP is yet. I'd love to say that's surprising, but I just don't think it is. That Nvidia won't commit to an MSRP could be seen as a small mercy, or another way of messing with their partners. Whatever the case, partners won't have to do much to both piss everyone off and sell all their stock at once. The fact of the matter is that both the RTX 2060s launched at $349, and the RTX 3060 that's supposed to have replaced it launched at $329. If the price ends up being anything higher than that, R slash hardware is going to lose their minds, whether it's justified or not. It feels like Nvidia is hanging partners out to dry again, while they continue to enjoy the positive perception of reasonable MSRP on their cards that board partners have no hope of matching with this release or any other, either in terms of price or performance. We'll have a link down below once they're available, but I'm not hopeful it'll be a good deal. Though as unpopular as this take might be, it'll still be a bargain, at least at off-the-shelf prices, compared to scalper RTX 2060 prices on eBay. I mean, look at this, they are regularly selling for more than $500 to $600, depending on whether it's the super variant of the card. And whoever bought this one for over $800 US dollars must have been pretty desperate. The people buying these scalped secondary market cards are the people who will benefit the most. They've clearly already accepted that they're going to have to shell out flagship money for a less than flagship experience, and more cards on the market means that there's less pressure for these secondhand GPUs. I mean, it's really a win-win for consumers as far as I'm concerned. Just like our new Swack-It on LTTStore.com, it's heavier than a sweater and lighter than a jacket. Everyone wins. Except not really. If Nvidia has been holding on to these GPUs because they couldn't sell them before now, then this is more of a positive for them than for anyone else. And it means that these GPUs have a finite quantity. But I don't think that's true. Nvidia would have sold remaining stock for cheap, or to a system integrator for pre-builds or what have you before now. Remember the 7900GTO? Those were basically 7900GTX chips that were perfectly fine, but deprecated by the outstanding 8800 series. Besides, there's no way that they'd have enough surplus to launch a whole new SKU at this point across their entire range of partners. 7900GTO, as you might recall, was MSI and EVGA exclusively due to its limited quantities. Now Turing, RTX 20 series, was produced on TSMC's 12 nanometer node. And more likely what's happening is Nvidia is utilizing otherwise idle production. Because you gotta remember guys, even though TSMC offers 7 nanometer and 5 nanometer for cutting edge products and is working on ramping 3 nanometer, they haven't necessarily just taken their last gen old equipment and hocked it in a bin. Due to the large upfront investment, that kind of stuff ends up getting phased out very gradually. I mean, even AMD's flagship X570 chipset is still using 14 nanometer because it's economical. So if no other GPUs are being produced on 12 nanometer right now, any new capacity that Nvidia gets out of those fabs is new capacity as far as the GPU market is concerned. And I think they made the right call going with the RTX 2060 Super cores as well because assuming that they're going to be using the relatively small TU106 die, they should be able to get more good dies per wafer than they would with something like a 2070 Super Redux or something along those lines. Okay, this is starting to make sense. Except for the fact that Nvidia is bundling these GPUs with 12 gigabytes of GDDR6. GDDR6 was a large part of the production bottleneck that plagued both Nvidia and AMD through the 2020 and 2021 phases of this shortage. And I haven't found any evidence to suggest that things are so much better now that a relief skew like this can reliably use so much memory. 12 gigs at 192-bit means that we're looking at 6 16 gigabit dies. The exact same layout of the RTX 3060. Well, this might have been done so partners could use the same or similar PCBs. It means that this memory is not going into RTX 3060 production or RTX 3050 production, which is expected sometime in early 2022. Get subscribed so you don't miss our coverage of that card when it launches. I can only assume that they have their reasons. Clearly Nvidia knows more about supply chain management than we do at this point, or indeed than they did when they launched the 8800 series all those years ago. It did seem that around summer of this year demand for GDDR6 had fallen in comparison with supply. So who knows? And on the subject of lessons learned, it does say a lot about the mature way that Nvidia is handling this by straight up calling this card what it is. 2060 12 gig. Remember how Nvidia rebranded Fermi and then later Kepler into two generations each? I mean, we got new GPUs with new names, but they were the same bloody thing. It's stupid that they have to get a gold star for calling a spade a spade in this industry, but here we are. And as long as the logistics do work out, this is going to be a net benefit to the overall availability of graphics cards for at least a little while, which is good for everyone. Just as long as we don't go back much further than this. I had a dream the other night that Nvidia re-released the GTX 780 and everyone was happy about it. I guess 28 nanometer is an even less utilized node these days, right? So I don't think that dream is coming true anytime soon. Re-releasing an older GPU is only remotely feasible because we are in such desperate circumstances and because the process node for that GPU is still in production and maybe not fully tapped by other industries. It certainly carries with it some challenges, like the fact that Nvidia might have to continue to support 20 series cards for much longer than they might have originally planned in order to maintain their reputation for industry-leading long-term driver support. This move then requires some lateral thinking on the part of both Nvidia and prospective buyers. Hey, it's not going to be for everyone, but we live in interesting times and the market is clearly there for this class of GPU. I just hope that the power consumption per hash rate is not appealing enough to make it appealing because I doubt they respun it for a light hash rate version. Just like I respun telling you about our sponsor, Jackery makes solar-ready portable power stations designed to improve outdoor life by providing power outdoors whenever and wherever you need it. Their Explorer 1500 portable power station has enough juice to keep all your devices powered and connected. Its huge 1500 watt-hour capacity and 1800 watt output rate allows up to seven devices plugged in simultaneously. It takes only four hours to recharge, up from 0 to 80%, and you can check out the Explorer 1500 at the link down below and get 10% off with code LINUS Tech Tips. Thanks for watching, guys. Go check out our video on how I was right that you should have built a PC back in 2019, but for all the wrong reasons. Yep, we all lost the game, but there's more info about the shortage and prices in there that might help to make some sense of these troubled times.