The manufacturing process has been refined

May 5, 2019 20:33 GMT  ·  By

Nvidia announced that it’s finally ditching the non-A versions of the TU104 and TU106 Turing chips. Are you confused yet?

The normal process through which the GPU dies are cast generates different quality for each one. Some are tested at the necessary speeds and perform with no problems, others are unstable, and some cores are disabled to make them stable.

Nvidia doesn’t throw away the ones with fewer cores; they just used them in GPUs that are not supposed to be overclocked. And, of course, they are sold at a lower price to video cards manufacturers, which means that the lower-quality ones land in video cards from the RTX 2060, 2070, and 2080 line of products that are not over-clocked.

Nvidia called these two variants A and Non-A variants, and this is part of the manufacturing process, although you probably won’t find it mentioned on the video card box. Chances are that if you don’t have an OC version of your particular card, you probably have a Non-A variant.

Improving the manufacturing process

Nvidia managed to refine the manufacturing process and, according to Tom's Hardware, they are finally putting an end to the Non-A variant by the end of May. For example, the MSI RTX 2070 GAMING is based on TU106-400-A1 (non-A) and the MSI RTX 2070 ARMOR OC is based on TU106-400A-A1(A).

The changes are also going to be reflected in the name of the GPU. The new versions are going to be named a little bit, the TU104-410 and the TU106-410. The best news is that they will be shipped already overclocked (and stable, of course.)

It’s quite possible that the number of Nvidia video cards will drop off a little until the new variants arrive, but let’s not forget that the non-A variants are not bad, they just don’t do well when overclocked. In fact, some people might start to look for them because they are going to be the cheaper option for quite a while.