MSI has quietly launched its new Ventus Important sequence of graphics playing cards that may complement the corporate’s common Ventus household of boards (as observed by @momomo_us). The brand new Ventus Important playing cards will provide nearly precisely the identical specs as regular Ventus add-in-boards, however will seemingly have a special bill-of-materials (BOM), which can make MSI’s prices barely decrease.
MSI’s Ventus Important lineup at the moment consists of the GeForce RTX 4070, GeForce RTX 4070 Ti, and GeForce RTX 4090, which rank among the many finest graphics playing cards. All boards have the identical clocks and cooling programs as commonplace Ventus playing cards, however Ventus Important options two DisplayPort and two HDMI outputs, whereas common Ventus boards have three DisplayPort and one HDMI output. Important clearly factors to one thing primary, however this will not be the case.
“It has slight structural enhancements over Ventus however largely the identical design/specs,” wrote Hassan Mujtaba of WccfTech. Be aware that MSI doesn’t formally disclose any variations between its Ventus and Ventus Important graphics boards, so allow us to attempt to speculate a bit of.
The show outputs are an attention-grabbing change. Proper now, DisplayPort on RTX 40-series playing cards stays on the DP1.4a spec, which has a most knowledge charge of 25.92 Gbps utilizing 8b/10b encoding. HDMI 2.1 in the meantime presents as much as 42 Gbps knowledge charges utilizing 16b/18b encoding. That is 62% extra bandwidth, which implies HDMI 2.1 can output as much as 8K 120 Hz utilizing DSC (Show Stream Compression), whereas DP1.4a tops out at round 8K 72 Hz utilizing DSC. However HDMI sometimes prices extra for licensing than DisplayPort, which makes this explicit change a bit odd.
In addition to the video ports, trendy graphics playing cards are extremely complicated gadgets that use a whole bunch of elements. Customized graphics playing cards, equivalent to MSI’s Ventus sequence, are likely to barely change the bill-of-materials over their lifetimes as a result of some elements might get cheaper and others might disappear from the market. Nevertheless it seems to be like MSI desires to concurrently provide Ventus and Ventus Important components, probably with barely completely different bundles and barely completely different BOMs.
Such an strategy permits MSI to be versatile with its prices and provide its GeForce RTX 40-series merchandise at extra aggressive costs. In fact, it stays to be seen whether or not these Ventus Important boards shall be considerably cheaper than non-Important Ventus cardsbut the important thing level is that with extra SKUs the corporate will be capable to choose the fitting sequence and produce it if it finds it extra appropriate.