The Full Nerd ep. 178: Rumors about RTX Ti variants, big CPU changes, and a push for ATX12VO

In this episode of The Full Nerd, Gordon Ung, Brad Chacos, Alaina Yee, and Adam Patrick Murray dive into rumors galore: the potential launch of Nvidia RTX 3070 Ti and RTX 3080 Ti graphics cards, changes to the type of socket used by future Ryzen processors, a new stock cooler size for Intel’s upcoming Alder Lake CPUs, and a dawn of the ATX12VO era.

We kick off with a brief discussion about what the release of an RTX 3070 Ti and RTX 3080 Ti could mean for gamers (hello, chance-at-a-GPU-at-last), plus thoughts on pricing and timing. But since we covered these possible RTX cards in a previous episode, we sail on over to the next bit of hot gossip pretty fast: that AMD’s upcoming AM5 socket will shift away from a pin grid array (PGA) to a land grid array (LGA), as revealed by ExecutableFix on Twitter.

The benefits of moving the pins from the CPU to the motherboard are obvious, of course, but that doesn’t stop some of us from noting that even though the risk of bent pins goes down, it’s still easier to fix them when it’s on the processor instead of the motherboard. The gang is more unified when it comes to thoughts on the probable new dimensions for Intel’s stock coolers starting with LGA 1700, as reported by Igor’s Lab—the change won’t really inconvenience anyone outside of people who like to reuse old stock coolers.

Wrapping up the show is our dive into the rumor that Intel may make ATX12VO standard for upcoming Alder Lake motherboards. Gordon lays out the details of what moves from a power supply to the mobo, as well as the fate of the 3.3V and 5V rails. The fate of your existing power supply gets covered, too.

You can witness all this, plus our answers to a few of your questions, in the video embedded above. You can also watch The Full Nerd episode 178 on YouTube (subscribe to the channel while you’re there!) or listen to it on Megaphone.fm if you prefer the audio alone.