The Chinese are testing a rare prototype of the GeForce GTX 1660 graphics card with PCIe 4.0 support.

An unusual engineering sample of an NVIDIA graphics card on a chip has been discovered in China. TU116, made in board format PG160 SKU18The special feature of this model is its support PCI Express 4.0 interface, although retail versions based on the TU116, such as the GeForce GTX 1660 and 1660 Ti, officially only support PCIe 3.0. This is a prototype, which, judging by the markings, is in the early stages of development.

According to the utility GPU-Z, the device was identified as NVIDIA Graphics Device with Device ID 10DE 2186, contains 1152 CUDA cores, 4 GB GDDR6 memory from Micron and runs on 128-bit bus with throughput 192 GB / s. Frequencies GPU reach 1005 MHz (base) и 2100 MHz (boost), which may indicate an experimental BIOS. The specified support DirectML, CUDA, OpenCL and Vulkan confirms the full-featured Turing architecture.

3DMark test showed throughput 12.23 GB / s via the PCIe 4.0 bus, which exceeds the limits of PCIe 3.0 x8, and thus confirms operation in PCIe 4.0 ×8 modeThe board itself does not have standard markings on the crystal, but other engineering samples of a similar model used markings D18Q — which corresponds to the TU116 chip revision.

This makes this sample extremely rare: of all the Turing chips, only the TU117STherefore, this card was either used for internal testing of the new bus on Turing or was an experimental attempt at unification with the Ampere platform. Such findings once again demonstrate the diversity of NVIDIA's internal engineering solutions that never made it to mass production.