NVIDIA only allows factory overclocking on Turing A-variants

TechPowerUp did some digging and discovered that NVIDIA is using two device IDs for its Turing GPUs. It appears the GPU giant has found a new way to segregate its GPUs, by only allowing factory overclocking on higher-quality Turing chips that are sold at a higher price point.

For example, NVIDIA has TU104-400 and TU104-400-A GPUs for GeForce RTX 2080 cards. Custom-design cards with factory overclocks are required to use the TU104-400-A chips. These are all the same chips, but the "A" series has been binned and sorted by properties like overclocking potential and power efficiency. It's unknown how large the price difference is between the two GPU device IDs.

When a board partner uses a -400 Turing GPU variant, factory overclocking is forbidden. Only the more expensive -400-A variants are meant for this scenario. Both can be overclocked manually though, by the user, but it's likely that the overclocking potential on the lower bin won't be as high as on the higher rated chips. Separate device IDs could also prevent consumers from buying the cheapest card, with reference clocks, and flashing it with the BIOS from a faster factory-overclocked variant of that card (think buying an MSI Gaming card and flashing it with the BIOS of Gaming X).

Consumers aren't prevented from overclocking the non-A series GPUs, but odds are these will have lower overclocking potential than the average A-series GPU.