A photo of an NVIDIA prototype graphics card was posted on Reddit by user “dustinbrooks” who said it was “tested by a buddy of his that works for a company that tests NVIDIA boards”. For those skeptics out there the card is clearly made by NVIDIA as indicated by the markings near the PCI-Express x16 slot connector. We can also see three 8-pin PCI-Express power connectors and a huge VRM with four cooling fans.
Now the GPU in the center of the board is missing, but it should be the GV102, the successor to GP102. We think this because the board has twelve GDDR6 memory chips located around the GPU socket. These are marked as D9WCW, which decodes to MT61K256M32JE-14:A. These chips are Micron-made 8 Gbit GDDR6, specified for 14 Gb/s data rate, operating at 1.35 V. So they will have a 384-bit memory bus and you’ll have 12 GB of VRAM total. This will give the card 672 GB/s memory bandwidth, which beats the 484 GB/s of the Vega 64 and GTX 1080 Ti.
At the top-edge of the card we see what looks like NVIDIA’s NVLink connector, but it is missing half of its pins. This means that you’ll only be able to connect two cards in SLI.
It seems like this board is used to test and qualify performance and power consumption in an unconstrained way. Based on the number of test points, jumpers, and overkill power supply (525W). This would allow engineers to decide on acceptable and performance targets for release. There is a single mini-DisplayPort connection on the card, which would be just fine for this type of testing.
