Month: September 2020

7,000MB/s read and 6,850MB/s write sequential performance

Although we might have seen a glimpse of Samsung’s 980 Pro, Sabrent is not giving it any room to breathe as it has unveiled its answer, the Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus PCIe 4.0 SSD.

Being a faster version of the Rocket 4, the Rocket 4 Plus uses Phison’s PS5018-E18 SSD PCIe 4.0 controller paired up with TLC NAND flash, hitting impressive sequential read and write performance of up to 7000MB/s for read and up to 6850MB/s for write.

The Rocket 4 Plus will be available in 500GB, 1TB, and 2TB capacities.

In order to deal with all the heat from such performance, Sabrent has come up with a custom heatsink, which combines an aluminum heatsink with copper heat coils. The complete heatsink also includes thermal tape, an aluminum tray, and a top heatspreader. According to Sabrent, this should prevent all thermal throttling, pushing it to maximum performance.

Unfortunately, the product page did not include 4K random read and write performance and we still do not have a price nor the availability date, but it will be interesting to see how well it does in detailed benchmarks.

According to leaked product pages from Gainward, Nvidia’s new high-end card is wild, at least when it comes to memory.

Here it is: The Nvidia RTX 3090. Or at least, one variant of the new GPU from hardware company Gainward, which appears to have accidentally posted product pages for the RTX 3090 and 3080 a little bit early. 

A day before Nvidia’s Ampere reveal event, where we expect Nvidia to officially show off the RTX 3090 and 3080 graphics cards, Gainward posted (and then removed) images and specs for its versions of each card, with specs that match up with previous leaks. The 3090 is a 24GB monster, while the 3080 comes equipped with 10GB of GDDR6X.

As spotted by Videocardz and our colleagues at Tom’s Hardware, the Gainward product pages list four configurations for the 3090 and 3080, two of which are “Golden Sample” (aka factory overclocked) variants. You can see the full specifications at the Videocardz link.

Here are the key specs for the base models:

RTX 3090 Phoenix

CUDA cores: 5248

Clock speed: 1695 MHz (Boost)

Memory: 24GB GDDR6X

Memory clock: 9750 MHz

Bandwidth: 936 GB/s

PCIe: Gen 4

Max power consumption: 350W

Output: HDMI 2.1, DisplayPort 1.4a

RTX 3080 Phoenix

CUDA cores: 4352

Clock speed: 1710 MHz (boost)

Memory: 10GB GDDR6X

Memory clock: 9500 MHz

Bandwidth: 760 GB/s

PCIe: Gen 4

Max power consumption: 320W

Output: HDMI 2.1, DisplayPort 1.4a

The biggest difference between the two is that huge jump in memory. For comparison, the RTX 2080 launched with 8GB of GDDR6 in 2018; the RTX 2080 Ti, released at the same time, had 11GB of GDDR6.

The amount of VRAM a graphics card has is especially important for gaming at 4K, where the larger frame buffer is especially memory hungry. Demanding games today can and will use more than 8GB. The RTX 3080 may not have much headroom at native 4K, then, while the RTX 3090 has tons; it looks like the card you’ll want for Microsoft Flight Simulator, as long as you can pair it with a high-end CPU.

This time around there’s no mention of a 3080 Ti at launch, which likely leaves the door open for a card in between the 3080 and 3090 in the future; perhaps a 3080 Ti or Super model with 16GB of memory. While we do expect Nvidia to announce a 3070, that model wasn’t leaked on Gainward’s site. Neither product page listed a price, but considering the specs, expect some big dollar signs tomorrow.

One other interesting tidbit: Gainward’s spec sheets state that both the 3090 and 3080 models require two 8-pin power connectors, meaning they seemingly won’t be using Nvidia’s new 12-pin connector.

Reached for comment on the GPU pages, Nvidia responded “We do not comment on rumors or unannounced products.”