Why it matters to you
When one of the world’s top overclockers lends their name to a graphics card, you know it’s going to be an impressive piece of equipment.
EVGA may be setting itself up to have the world’s most overclockable GTX 1080 Ti graphics card, with a teaser of a Kingpin Edition, built in conjunction with the world-famed overclocker. The as-yet-unannounced card is said to have a new high-efficiency power design, as well as unprecedented overclocking potential.
The GTX 1080 Ti is not only one of the world’s most powerful single-core graphics cards — second only to the Nvidia Titan Xp — but it has proven to be very overclockable, too. Vince Lucido, otherwise known as Kingpin, previously pushed it to break all sorts of records by hitting a frequency as high as 3GHz on the core. This new design could end up being even more capable.
Although no official announcements have been made for the card, EVGA product manager Jacob Freeman has been tweeting out images of a secretive card, said to offer “overclocking perfection.” He claims the card is currently undergoing liquid nitrogen testing at “Kingpin’s lab,” so the connection is certainly there.
Visiting Kingpins lab pic.twitter.com/U17MPjQsub
— Jacob Freeman (@EVGA_JacobF) May 25, 2017
Other images spotted on Lucido’s Facebook page (via Hexus) show a custom Kingpin logo on the PCB of a card, describing it as being highly efficient and indicating that it uses a “next gen KP power design,” which delivers “Pascal OC perfection.” Considering Lucido has had so much success overclocking the Pascal core on the GTX 1080 Ti, it would make sense that whatever custom card he’s working on, it’s based on the same reference design.
The final image on his page tells us that it’s “almost time” too, so whatever card this does turn out to be can’t be too far away from release. Chances are it will be expensive and not a card aimed at the average user, but if you’re a hardware enthusiast who loves pushing your system to the limit, there may only be one card of choice for you when this one rolls around.
Of course though, that discounts AMD’s impending potential disruption of the high-end graphics card market. With Vega just around the corner, it may be a good idea to wait and see what reviewers think of that new line of cards before buying anything new.