MSI has just registered 29 Nvidia Ampere graphics cards

Nvidia GPU
(Image credit: Future)

MSI has just registered a slew of what appear to be Nvidia Ampere graphics cards codes with the Eurasian Economic Commission. Without directly naming the different GeForce RTX 30-series GPUs, MSI has entered 29 different codes into the database, but has specifically registered them as 'video cards.'

We're expecting the new Nvidia cards to kickstart a new era of graphics in the coming weeks, with CEO, Jen-Hsun Huang, presenting at the GeForce Special Event on September 1. That's just seven days to wait for the full details about the RTX 3090 et al. Until then all we've got is a little light leakage and some rampant speculation about the new generation of GeForce GPUs.

The listing in the EEC database contains details about what looks like three different GPU models with a number of variations attached to each of them. 

There are the 602-V388, 602-V389, and 602-V390 versions (though there is also a listing for a 602-3889, but that reads like a typo to me), and if this matches with MSI's previous GPU naming convention we can expect the lower number to be related to the higher-spec cards.

In the RTX 20-series V375 referred to the RTX 2060, V373 was attached to the RTX 2070, V372 cards housed the RTX 2080 GPU, and the V371 code represented RTX 2080 Ti cards. If the same rings true for this coming generation then that would make the V388 variants RTX 3090 cards, the V389 as RTX 3080, and the four V390 codes being attached to the RTX 3070.

Unfortunately I think that's about all we can glean from this database listing, sometimes GPU codes in the EEC will detail actual card specs, with reference to VRAM capacity, for example, but the third number in the series appears to purely be referencing different card versions. 

EEC registration (Image credit: Future)

With MSI's RTX 20-series cards that third number in the series was appended with an 'R' and it looks like the RTX 30-series is operating sequentially being appended with an 'S' instead to indicate a subsequent generation.

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Now, while there are 29 different codes in this listing—14 for V388, 11 for V389, and just four for V390—that doesn't automatically mean that MSI is going to be dropping 29 different Nvidia Ampere cards at launch next month. It's likely that MSI is simply registering the codes now in preparation for further launches down the line, as well as the initial RTX 3090, RTX 3080, and RTX 3070 releases in September.

The launch of new generation of Nvidia cards is getting mighty close now, and soon we won't have to deal with the slew of rumours and faked pictures that are clogging up the intermawebs right now. 

Well, I guess then we can all move on to rumours and faked pictures of AMD's Big Navi, right?

Dave James
Managing Editor, Hardware

Dave has been gaming since the days of Zaxxon and Lady Bug on the Colecovision, and code books for the Commodore Vic 20 (Death Race 2000!). He built his first gaming PC at the tender age of 16, and finally finished bug-fixing the Cyrix-based system around a year later. When he dropped it out of the window. He first started writing for Official PlayStation Magazine and Xbox World many decades ago, then moved onto PC Format full-time, then PC Gamer, TechRadar, and T3 among others. Now he's back, writing about the nightmarish graphics card market, CPUs with more cores than sense, gaming laptops hotter than the sun, and SSDs more capacious than a Cybertruck.