People haven’t even gotten their hands on Nvidia’s new RTX 3070, 3080 and 3090 cards yet. But only a day after their official announcement, we’re already getting wind of even more GPUs in the Ampere stack, courtesy of Lenovo.
The company filed a listing for a Russian-only model of their upcoming Legion T7 34IMZ5 gaming desktop. The APAC/Australian models of the desktop come with 10th gen Intel i7 and i9 gaming CPUs in various configurations.
The desktops have been sitting in the Lenovo Legion database for a while. But on August 26 (likely August 27 Australian time), a new entry was made for a Legion T7 that comes with a RTX 3070 Ti GPU, sporting 16GB GDDR6 memory:
The 3070 Ti references aren’t appearing for me at the time of writing, but it’s a logical move for Nvidia. The VRAM difference between the RTX 3080 and RTX 3090 always made it likely that Nvidia would introduce something to bridge the gap. Ti or Super-branded versions, like they did for the 20-series Turing cards, makes a whole lot of sense.
That said, it’s hard not to think this ended up as some kind of typo. A RTX 3080 Ti makes more sense than an RTX 3070 Ti, rather than offering a 16GB model of the (currently) lowest offering in the RTX Ampere lineup. However, it would make a lot of sense if Nvidia were to offer a 16GB or 20GB model of the RTX 3080 down the road — something with not quite as much RAM or CUDA cores as the RTX 3090.
There’s already definitely a case for gamers to think about getting more memory for their GPUs, however. More and more games are starting to eat up to 7GB and 8GB of VRAM at 1440p with all effects enabled, as do slightly older games at 8K. Having that extra buffer would certainly make sense as we look at the next few years of games and their likely memory/bandwidth requirements.
In any case, we’ll probably start hearing about what AMD has to offer before the RTX 3070 Ti, or any Ti-branded Ampere card, actually launches. That’s likely to cause all sorts of price shifts — and when that happens, then we’ll see where any Ti-branded cards are likely to slot into.
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