MSI RTX 4070 Ventus 3X E 12G OC equipped with AD103 appears

Previous reports indicated that NVIDIA would update certain GeForce RTX 40 series graphics cards, introducing new chips for models including the RTX 4070, RTX 4060 Ti, and RTX 4060, spanning from mainstream to upper-midrange segments. The RTX 4070 will be the first to appear, equipped not with the existing AD104-251 chip but with the AD103-175-KX chip. NVIDIA’s GeForce Game Ready 551.86 WHQL driver, released in early March this year, already supports these graphics cards featuring the new chip.

According to Techpowerup, a user reported an unusual model, the “MSI RTX 4070 Ventus 3X E 12G OC,” which GPU-Z failed to correctly identify. An analysis of the data and device ID submitted by the user revealed that this graphics card is indeed a new version of the RTX 4070, powered by the AD103 chip.

In the RTX 4070, which employs the AD104-251 chip, 46 out of 60 SMs are enabled, which is 76.67%. With the shift to the AD103-175-KX chip, 46 out of 80 SMs are utilized, reducing the available SM percentage to 57.5%, nearly half of which are disabled by NVIDIA. Since the AD103 and AD104 chips share similar PCB area, pin, and packaging dimensions, NVIDIA’s partners can seamlessly integrate the new chip into existing circuit board designs.

In the future, NVIDIA might also use the AD103 in the GeForce RTX 4070 SUPER, simply by setting the available number of SMs to 56 and the L2 cache to 48MB. This raises another interesting issue: whether the switch to the AD103 chip in the RTX 4070 and RTX 4070 SUPER will impact power consumption and heat generation, a topic worthy of attention.

Techpowerup has stated that GPU-Z will correctly recognize GeForce RTX 4070 graphics cards equipped with the AD103 chip in its next update.