In March, information appeared that Nvidia was planning to “refresh” the GeForce RTX 4060 to RTX 4070 cards. The information at the time indicated that there would be no fundamental change and that these cards were only to receive significantly limited chips from higher-end cards. In addition to the AD107-400, the RTX 4060 should have received the AD106-255 based on the RTX 4060 Ti. The RTX 4060 Ti, on the other hand, in addition to the classic versions with the AD106-350, was also supposed to get the AD104-150, which is a version originally from the more powerful RTX 4070. Well, you probably guessed correctly that the RTX 4070 was supposed to get a different chip from a higher model, this time instead of the AD104- 250 AD103-175-KX should have appeared here. And that’s what really happens.
A screenshot of the MSI RTX 4070 Ventus 3X E 12 GB OC graphics card appeared, with which the GPU-Z application had an unusual problem and reported it as an unknown card. It is surprising at first glance, because the RTX 4070 has been a well-known card for a long time. All indications are that it didn’t fully recognize it precisely because there is an AD103-175-KX chip with only 5888 CUDA cores activated out of the 10240 that comprise the full-fledged AD103 chip. This means that 42.5% of the chip has been disabled. That’s a really massive deactivation of a large area and lots of compute units.
While the AD104 has a chip area of 294 mm2, in the case of the AD103 chip variant, the RTX 4070 has a chip area of 379 mm2, which is 29% more. But when it comes to other specifications, there doesn’t seem to be any change here. The clocks look identical (base 1.92 GHz, Boost 2.475 GHz), it also looks the same with 12 GB of GDDR6X memory on a 192-bit bus with 21Gbps chips and a throughput of 504 GB/s.
