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NVIDIA has been rumored to announce its new 50-series GPUs at the upcoming CES event, and now it looks like there may be some more evidence to support that theory, thanks to a recent leak of a GeForce RTX 5080 GPU from MSI. Spotted by VideoCardz (via TechRadar), a couple of images showed up of the retail packaging of MSI’s RTX 5080 GPU. The images surfaced on a forum called ChipHell but have since been removed.
Luckily, the removal of the post didn’t stop some of the details about the graphics card from getting out, because information is displayed on the back of the box. The forum post didn’t mention anything about pricing or release dates, but the information on the packaging offers up a handful of specs and features.
Leak showcases the MSI GeForce RTX 5080 will use a triple fan design
While the leak doesn’t specify everything about this graphics card, it does reveal some details about the card’s features, as well as the design. As VideoCardz notes, it will use three fans and it’s the OC edition.
It’ll also come with 16GB of GDDR7 VRAM, as well as four ports for display connectivity. There will be three DisplayPort connections and one HDMI port. It’s still unclear what versions these ports will be. But it’s not unlikely that the HDMI port will be HDMI 2.1. For DisplayPort, the RTX 40-series GPUs had support for DisplayPort 1.4, and not DisplayPort 2.1. So it’s possible the new 50-series GPUs could use this same version. It might all depend on whether or not DisplayPort 2.1 DP80 certified cables support a longer cable length now.
As shorter cable length may have been a big reason why NVIDIA chose not to support DisplayPort 2.1 when the RTX 40-series cards were launched.
The RTX 5080 may be the first model to launch
If you’ve been buying GPUs for your desktop gaming PC for the past few generations, then you know NVIDIA never releases all models at the same time. This is unlikely to change. That probably leaves consumers looking for an upgrade to wonder which card will launch first.
Based on the leak of this packaging, it might be the RTX 5080. It’s toward the top end of NVIDIA’s lineup. Not to mention it will probably be significantly more affordable than the RTX 5090 cards. Making it a good candidate for the first card to launch.
That being said, the RTX 5080 isn’t going to be inexpensive. In fact, it’s quite possibly going to see a price increase over last year’s RTX 4080 GPUs. A recent leak from late December suggested that the new RTX 5080 GPUs will cost about $2,799 AUD. That’s about $1,500 USD. A solid $300 USD over the previous generation. A possible GPU shortage mentioned by NVIDIA last year could be the reason for these price increases.