NVIDIA binning 20-Series GPUs to limit factory overclocking @ TechPowerUp

I remember back in the "old" days Intel was having piracy problems with processors where shady companies would rebrand lower-end chips and sell them at the higher price claiming they were higher-end chips.

It would seem in an attempt to help control shrinkage due to RMA'ers NVIDIA is now pre-binning chips and only allowing certain chips from being sold as factory overclocked.  

We reached out to industry sources and confirmed that for Turing, NVIDIA is creating two device IDs per GPU to correspond to two different ASIC codes per GPU model (for example, TU102-300 and TU102-300-A for the RTX 2080 Ti). The Turing -300 variant is designated to be used on cards targeting the MSRP price point, while the 300-A variant is for use on custom-design, overclocked cards. Both are the same physical chip, just separated by binning, and pricing, which means NVIDIA pretests all GPUs and sorts them by properties such as overclocking potential, power efficiency, etc.

When a board partner uses a -300 Turing GPU variant, factory overclocking is forbidden. Only the more expensive -30-A variants are meant for this scenario.

This is actually quite smart as it not only helps NVIDIA make appropriate money but allows them to pass the savings on to the board partners who will then (re)bin the chips again so they can offer different levels of factory overclocking.

Related Web URL: https://www.techpowerup.com/247660/nvidia-segregat...