Not yet clear how it got on the market, but in Russia they are selling one RTX 3080 Ti with 20 GB of memory, 8 GB more than the NVIDIA solution introduced in early June.
The card in question – a Gigabyte Gaming OC to be exact – not supported by NVIDIA Game Ready Drivers, so much so that a local Youtuber managed to try it only in mining (here the video). The Russian branch of Gigabyte, in fact, has not provided any driver for this model claiming its non-existence. Photos and tests prove otherwise, and on TechPowerUp even possible track down a BIOS of a RTX 3080 Ti AORUS, proving that Gigabyte has worked on multiple solutions.
Apparently, the card is not part of the Lite Hash Rate (LHR) solutions, i.e. it does not have the limiter that halves the performance with the algorithms behind cryptocurrency mining such as Ethereum. This, along with the other clues, points to a series of prototypes that ended up on the market by mistake: For a long time, rumors indicated the arrival of an RTX 3080 Ti with 20 GB of GDDR6X memory on the 320-bit bus, while in the end we welcomed a card with 12 GB of GDDR6X memory on the 384-bit bus.
The card, which the Youtuber had access to remotely, was brought by the retailers to operate with 100 MHz more on the core and 1000 MHz more on the memory than the basic specifications. In parallel, the TGP was limited to 80%. In this capacity, in the hands of the Youtuber, the RTX 3080 Ti 20 GB proved capable of mine Ethereum by tapping a hash rate of 94 MH / s, more than 60% more than the official RTX 3080 Ti 12 GB.
The card was offered for sale at 225,000 rubles (2600 euros), a price within reach of miners or collectors but certainly not for gamers, and not only because the card is not supported by drivers, but also because the performance improvement obtainable compared to a RTX 3080 Ti 12GB would still be laughable, even with appropriate drivers.